Last month, I saw a post on a social media platform called Connect app where a user claimed that personal details of around four million users were leaked by the Clubhouse. That was quite surprising considering that Clubhouse is one of the most secure social apps.
Clubhouse Says There Had Been No Data Leaks
Last month, I saw a post on a social media platform called Connect app where a user claimed that personal details of around four million users were leaked by the Clubhouse. That was quite surprising considering that Clubhouse is one of the most secure social apps.
Clubhouse Denied Data Breach
I started checking every news related to data leak. There are many reports on social media channels like Facebook, and Twitter that the data of Clubhouse users has been leaked. One of the tweets went as far as suggesting that millions of phone numbers of Clubhouse users are up for sale on the dark web.
However, the company that manages Clubhouse made a statement in July that there has been no data breach. Clubhouse emphasised on the fact that it continues to follow security practices as privacy and security aspects are of utmost importance to Clubhouse.
Different claims of experts
A company spokesperson revealed that there is a series of bots that generate billions of random phone numbers. Then in late July Jiten Jain, the leading cyber security expert said on Twitter that phone numbers of a large number of Clubhouse users are up for sale on the darknet. He also shared a screenshot which showed that a hacker is all set to put this data on auction in the coming September.
The data also included the number of synced contacts that users had in their phonebooks. Therefore, the probability is quite high that your phone number would also be included. even if you do not have a Clubhouse app on your mobile. This is indeed scary.
However, according to one independent security expert, the entire data leak claim appears to be bogus as the alleged Clubhouse data consists only of mobile numbers that are without names.
According to him, there are no names, photos or any other important details in that particular data. Anyone can easily make such a list of phone numbers and claim anything. Therefore, the purported data leak claim seems fake.
Interestingly, some researchers from a leading university in the US had warned that the Clubhouse app could leak users’ audio data to the Chinese government. They mentioned a Chinese company who are providers of real-time engagement software that supplied the back-end infrastructure to Clubhouse.
Clubhouse has recently done away with its waitlist system, and those who intend to join this app can do it without any problem. It also revealed that it has added almost 10 million users to the community since its launch on Android in mid-May. It was actually a ploy on the part of Clubhouse to convince other users that everything is just fine and people shouldn’t be worried about security aspects.
To ensure that their audio chat room is open to all, recently, Clubhouse also dropped their invite-only system. Clubhouse has also made a statement that no user identifiable information is returned by the API. However, the reports of the leak has definitely made its millions of users jittery.