How Whisper app tracks ‘anonymous’ users

So even if you disable the location feature it still tracks your location? I'd be interested what they mean by 'broad location tracking' but I can't imagine that it's consistent with their anonymity claims. e.g. see http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130325/srep01376/full/srep01...

> The Guardian witnessed this practice on a three-day visit to the company’s Los Angeles headquarters last month, as part of a trip to explore the possibility of an expanded journalistic relationship with Whisper.

So they look to partner, don't like what they see and turn it into a story? Whisper has two problems: violating its users' trust, and letting an external group in without an agreement in place. The Guardian also looks bad flipping this into a lede in my mind.

I freaked out slightly when I saw the headline. Shame there's so many name collisions like that...

I'm the CTO of Whisper. This is really bad reporting. A few notes:

1. we use a legacy maxmind geoip database so we can put the whisper in a general location. that is so inaccurate as to be laughable. for instance, my current IP using our service says "USA", though I'm in Venice, CA. This is hardly a privacy violation, and it's really important for a bunch of reasons:

a) The whisper needs to actually appear in the app, and it won't appear without some general location. The % of all Whispers which are tagged as somewhere in the middle of Kansas because we don't really know where they are (but we know they are in the US) is very high. This is not a scandal.

b) We want to know where a user is in a general sense for things like tracking timezone so when we send pushes we know not to send pushes at 3 in the morning. you'd be surprised how often device timezone may not always match with physical location.

c) We use general location to determine things users may be interested in. folks who post in lower manhattan may see different results than people in College Station, TX, over time.

d) We have a lot of anti-spam technology, and what IP you posted from, and what country that IP is in, is important. I can't elaborate on this but it's incredibly logical why we would use that information for things like keeping the app from filling with spammy garbage.

e) We throw away the IP you used to create the whisper after a brief period of time.

2. We've been working with researchers at a local university to ensure the anonymity around location was such that they couldn't determine groups of whispers from the same user. They contributed to our randomization algorithms and provided suggestions around security.

3. We fuzz location even more than this on write and on reads. We randomize it based on the observer who asks for the location, and we randomize it BEFORE WE SAVE IT TO OUR DATABASE. In other words, we don't actually know where the user was once the whisper is saved, and we can't even tell later.

4. The guardian's reporting that we changed our terms of service in response to the article is beyond silly. I am happy to show a screenshot of the email chain between myself and our lawyers back in July. The entire point of updating the TOS was to make it clearer and easier to read, not to protect ourselves or give ourselves more rights to user data. It takes MONTHS to get things like TOS write for an app like Whisper, and we take it seriously.

5. Edited to add... We just don't have any personally identifiable information. Not name, email, phone number, etc. I can't tell you who a user is without them posting their actual personal information, and in that case, it would be a violation of our terms of service.

>The Guardian also looks bad flipping this into a lede in my mind.

The Grauniad would look bad for claiming to be journalists and not reporting on this.

edit: really? Journalists, not under any 'off-the-record' or non-disclosure agreements, seek to partner with an app that allows anonymous communication, and finds that it's tracking it's users, storing all information, ignoring opt outs, and funneling information to governments.

They shouldn't report this because what? They should report this even if they are not journalists, but have a moral center.