Anonymous secret sharing app Whisper left sensitive profile data exposed for years

guest · Mar 10, 2020

Anonymous secret sharing app Whisper left sensitive profile data exposed for years
March 10, 2020
https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/10/...ed-leak-private-info-anonymous-secret-sharing

Whisper, an anonymous secret-sharing mobile app that rose to prominence more than half a decade ago, has been inadvertently exposing sensitive information about its users for years through a public online database, according to a new report from The Washington Post.

The app, while far from as popular as it was in the few years after its release in 2012, is still used by more than 30 million people a month, some of whom are under the age of 18 and share confessions about teenage sexual encounters and information related to sexual orientation.
According to The Post, which was actively able to query the database in real time before Whisper took it down, a search for users who listed themselves as 15 years of age returned as many as 1.3 million results.

But the records left unprotected online included information like age, location, ethnicity, residence, in-app nickname, and membership in any of the app’s groups.
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he Post reports. Porter and Ehrlich said they notified federal law enforcement of the situation, as well as Whisper, prior to contacting The Washington Post. Only when The Post reached out to Whisper parent company MediaLab was the database made private.

“This has very much violated the societal and ethical norms we have around the protection of children online,” Ehrlich told The Post, adding that MediaLab’s actions here have been “grossly negligent.”
However, MediaLab told The Post the database was “not designed to be queried directly,” and it removed the information as a result. The company has also found itself in hot water in the past over its handling of user data, like in 2014, when it was revealed the company was gathering location data on users without their consent and even if they explicitly opted out.
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The Washington Post: Secret-sharing app Whisper left users’ locations, fetishes exposed on the Web

Hundreds of millions of users’ intimate messages, tied to their locations, were publicly viewable until after the company was contacted by The Washington Post.

The researchers, however, said the ability to download all of the data in bulk — and potentially combine it with other sensitive data sets — represented a huge risk for users’ privacy.
“This is the most intimate data laid bare in a massive unprotected database for the entire world to see.”

Account data could also be used to identify sensitive personal details or locations.
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Anonymous secret sharing app Whisper left sensitive profile data exposed for years

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