That’s because Secret, Whisper, Wickr, Telegram, and Snapchat are all closed systems. It’s easy to see, for example, how a location tied to a person or device and a time stamp could be valuable in any criminal investigation.īut even if consumers do research and read the TOS, there is a certain level of blind faith required to believe that apps like Secret and Whisper are secure and abiding by the practices they set forth in their terms. government might want to know tomorrow,” says Sandvik.
“It is impossible to say what type of information you might have today that might be considered sensitive, or the U.S. The logic: If I’m not publishing or sending incriminating information through these apps and services, then I don’t have to worry about being tracked. Some consumers also think the TOS doesn’t apply to them. They’re long and full of legalese, and it’s much easier just to hit the “I accept” button. “If you read their TOS, you realize nothing you say on there is private or secret, because they’re admitting they collect certain forms of information and they will respond to law enforcement requests,” says Hanni Fakhoury, lawyer at the Electronic Freedom Foundation.īut plenty of consumers don’t read the TOS. In the case of Whisper, you’re agreeing to being tracked. Though many people fail to read the TOS before engaging with a site or app, once they agree to the terms, it is a binding contract. The consumer dilemmaĪ company’s terms of service (TOS) is supposed to clear up confusion for users about how location or other personal information may be used or stored within a company’s databases.
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Without a universal set of standards, app makers are free to create products that could potentially qualify as anonymous or secure, with users largely left in the dark as to what that really means. Even Tor does not guarantee it,” says Runa Sandvik, a privacy and security researcher at Freedom of the Press Foundation, an organization devoted to preserving public interest journalism. “There’s no tool out there that can guarantee 100 percent anonymity. The difficulty with false advertising charges in these instances is that there is no single definition for what constitutes anonymity on the web. It’s also the reason Senator Jay Rockefeller is launching an investigation into Whisper, as Politico reported last week. “You have two options: One is to learn all the things that researchers have been doing, and the other option is to write your own app and say you’ve solved those problems,” says Matt Green, professor of cyber security at John Hopkins University.īuilding an “anonymous” app that doesn’t provide the anonymity it claims is illegal, which is why the FTC took Snapchat to court. It’s easy to see how a startup looking to gain commercial success would eschew some level of privacy in order to facilitate a more friendly user interface. But for certain people, like journalists in countries with tight censorship laws, the anonymity component of the app trumps user experience.
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Tor, for example, is difficult to install and makes for slow web browsing. And while these deliver on anonymity, they’re not exactly user-friendly. Organizations like the Tor Project and serious cryptographers have devoted years to developing effective anonymous web and mobile experiences. For one thing, true anonymity is difficult to achieve.
The problem with commercial anonymous appsĮven with the media teardowns, these companies don’t have a lot of incentive to make truly anonymous apps. The company settled charges with the Federal Trade Commission in May for overstated claims of user anonymity and security. Though Snapchat’s servers weren’t hacked in this particular event, the ephemeral messaging service has been found to be less secure - and less ephemeral - than it advertises. But the same can’t be said for Snapchat, which repeatedly finds its way into the news, most recently for a leak of 200,000 user photos that ended up on Internet forum 4chan. Secret has shown it’s vulnerable to hacking, though the company does have a bug bounty program that has successfully kept Secret out of the news, as Wired reported.
The revelation about Whisper is just the latest in a string of incidents that remind users that many, if not all, of the consumer apps on the market that promise anonymity and security fail to deliver. The report also says that Whisper is saving posts and their location information to a searchable database, despite its promise to be “the safest place on the Internet,” though Whisper has denied those allegations. Last week in an investigative story the Guardian revealed that anonymous social feed Whisper is actually collecting user locations based on geolocation and IP addresses.