Why Is Clubhouse Recording Your Conversations? The Platform's Major Privacy Issues
Clubhouse instantly achieved the status of an elite platform with millions of fans. However, its users raise serious concerns about the voice chat service's questionable privacy and security practices, and using the app could also cause troubles.
Earlier this year, the Clubhouse app became popular around the world in a matter of days. This voice chat service has been around for more than a year, but only experienced a surge in popularity after celebrities like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg had suddenly signed up to it.
Clubhouse has access to your contacts
First, the application requests access to the user's contact list right away, and so far, there is no way to delete the information that you shared with the service. In fact, you provide Clubhouse with details about which people you are connected to and how, and also give it the right to send push notifications to your contacts (if they also have an application installed). And in general, it feels weird that some strangers have access to your contacts list and see contacts that you would not want anyone to know about.
Invites fraud
Secondly, the popular social network with a touch of elitism immediately attracted many scammers. After all, you can't just easily sign up for Clubhouse, you can only do this by invitation. And, of course, people began to sell invites, but there is no guarantee that you will immediately receive one.
In addition to invitations, there is a kind of fraud related to the fact that Clubhouse is still officially available only for iOS. Therefore, fake applications for Android began to appear, which may contain Trojans.
Why does Clubhouse record conversations?
Officially, it is impossible to record conversations in Clubhouse, and you can even be banned for this, but this applies only to users. According to the privacy policy, the app itself can record rooms' conversations and store them for a while. Officially, for moderation purposes. But there were already hacker attacks that allowed these records to be stolen and maybe even used against you.
Why does Clubhouse data go to China?
Finally, there are additional concerns about whether Clubhouse is safe after all. As cybersecurity experts at the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) found out, the app directly uses the developments of the Chinese company Agora to transmit audio in real-time. Traffic analysis showed that user data is also transmitted in plaintext to Chinese servers without encryption, and it is not entirely clear how this data can be used in the future.