Anonymous application whisper compromised user privacy

The Guardian of the UK's comprehensive daily newspaper (the Guardian) has recently reported an anonymous application whisper revealing the privacy of users, even those who have chosen to turn off the positioning feature.

Whisper is a tree hole anonymous application, users can select pictures, and embedded in the picture text content, anonymously published dynamic message. The application is very popular among youth groups, and 36 of Krypton has reported this.

The Whisper co-founder and CEO of Michael Heyward, known as "the safest place in the internet World", has recently been caught tracking the location of users and sharing that information with the U.S. Department of Defense.

The cause of the whole thing is this:

The Guardian's two journalists had earlier conducted a 3-day in-depth survey of Whisper's headquarters in Los Angeles in an interview with Whisper to explore the possibility of expanding the news relationship.

During the interview, they found that Whisper has an internal mapping tool that can be used to filter and search for user GPS data, and it can even pinpoint users who have sent messages within a 500-meter radius. The technology allows Whisper to monitor news developments from locations such as the Pentagon and national security agencies, while also tracking the movement of individual users ' positions without effort.

Even if the user turns off the positioning feature when the message is posted, whisper also searches for and confirms the user's location information through IP positioning technology.

The Guardian also states:

User data, including messages that users think they have deleted, are all sorted and stored in Whisper searchable databases. Whisper Although there is no access to the user ID and the user's cell phone number, but all data are marked with accurate time and location information, and since the launch of the Whisper, all the data published through the application of the information are stored in the database, this and whisper was only " Keeping a short period of time for the user "is inconsistent."

Whisper has a dedicated team, the "newsworthy" users closely monitored, not only the use of backend tools for the user in the application of the operational history of the study, but also record the location of users change information. These "newsworthy" users are usually members of the military, or people who claim to work at Yahoo, Disney and Capitol Hill.

In addition, Whisper has cooperated with the U.S. Department of Defense to provide and share user data for the department's intelligence personnel, so that intelligence agents can investigate the use of words such as "suicide" and "self-inflicted injury" based on information released by U.S. forces.

After the Guardian's announcement, whisper a 5-page long article declaring that the company did not track, collate and disclose user data, accusing the guardian of "Bad lies".

Interestingly, earlier in Monday, Whisper rewrote his terms of service, changing the description of "volunteering" in the old terms to a warning: Remember that after you disable the positioning function, we still have the possibility to record your location.

Whisper currently produces nearly 2.6 million news updates a day. The company has been trying to find a number of cooperative agencies to expand the business market. After the incident, the longest cooperation with Whisper BuzzFeed claimed: The partnership with Whisper will be suspended.