How the ‘safest place on the internet’ tracks its users

The Whisper app that was intended to be a safe haven for anonymity is exploiting a vast library of texts, photographs and, in many cases, the location of their authors – from Guantánamo to the White House

In an elegant warehouse-style building on Venice Beach known locally as “the fortress”, Michael Heyward, a tech entrepreneur, was struggling to control the remote-controlled drone hovering above the heads of his employees.

The 27-year-old son of Andy Heyward, one of cartoon character Inspector Gadget’s co-creators, giggled as the drone came crashing down to the floor, narrowly missing the head of a female developer.

Outside the building, once owned by Hollywood royalty Anjelica Huston, skateboarders, surfers, tourists and the homeless mingled in the Californian sun. It was just another day on Silicon Beach – a name the local tech crowd loathe, but one that has come to define a new generation of savvy, young firms sprouting up in Los Angeles, challenging the tech giants of San Francisco.

One of the hottest new kids on the block is Whisper, the company Heyward co-founded, which is part of a new wave of Venice Beach-based social media companies that have grown up in Facebook’s shadow. Snapchat is next door; Tinder, the dating app, is round the corner.

Whisper’s selling point is anonymity. It describes itself in the app store as “the first completely anonymous social network”.

For Heyward the established social media networks – Facebook and Twitter – have created a dilemma. People can no longer speak honestly; they self-censor for fear of being judged by their peers, colleagues and family, or portray only idealised version of their lives.

Whisper is a platform for the truth, however ugly.

A quick look at the app proves the point. “I push great guys away because I’m terrified they will leave like my dad did. I hate him for causing this,” reads one message you would be unlikely to see on Facebook. “That moment when ur mum tells u she hates u because ur gay 17/M/gay,” reads another.

Hate speech, real names, pornography, drug dealing and other offences are all sifted out of the app. Some 40,000 people mentioning suicidal tendencies have been automatically referred to a suicide hotline. Whisper has set up a nonprofit, Your Voice, to help raise awareness of mental health issues.

Whisper now hosts more than 2.5m messages every day, an outpouring of intimate confessions made on a platform Heyward has described as the “safest place on the internet”.

But Whisper has a secret.

The Guardian was given access to the company’s back-end system – the tool they use to sift through the millions of messages posted via the app each week – and spoke at length with the company’s staff to explore the possibility of an expanded partnership.

Whisper’s internal practices appeared at odds with Heyward’s public declarations, some of the company’s terms of service and, in all probability, the expectations of users who are downloading the app in growing numbers on the assumption it will give them a cloak of invisibility.

The company denies this, pointing to its policy of not collecting information – such as user names, phone numbers or addresses – that would easily identify them. “Whisper does not collect nor store any personal identifiable information from users therefore their privacy and anonymity are always protected,” the company said in a statement.

But four days after Whisper learned the Guardian planned to make public its internal practices, the company quietly rewrote its terms of service and introduced a new privacy policy.

Furnished with an extremely simple password, we were given access to the company’s vast library of texts and photographs and, in most cases, the location of their authors. The company’s developers have created a back-end analytics tool to conduct more refined searches of the database, the most powerful of which pinpoints location.

Read More:  http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/16/-sp-whispers-secret-safest-place-internet-tracks-users