Last yr , anonymous secret - share app Whispergot chew out for trail its usersin a bestial unmasking from The Guardian . Only now , months later , The Guardianis backpedaling harder than a spin class devotee on many of its accusationsagainst Whisper .
The original account accuse Whisper of nail users ’ precise locating even after they opted out of geo - tracking , among other privacy infractions . This made Whisper see like crap , because the app toted its power to protect its drug user , and there it was , haunt them . The downfall out was knockout : Whisper’spartnership with Buzzfeed got put on hold , and its editor - in - head ( and former Gawker author ) Neetzan Zimmerman got suspend afterdefending the company on Twitter .
Well , now it looks like Zimmerman ’s bullish defense of his ( now former ) employer was founded . The Guardian basicallyredacted its most damning accusal , that Whisper was geo - stalking users and acquit in fashion that threaten namelessness :
We reported that IP addresses can only provide an approximate reading of a somebody ’s whereabouts , not usually more accurate than their commonwealth , state or city . We are happy to clear up that this data ( which all cyberspace party receive ) is a very rough and unreliable indicator of positioning . We are also happy to make clear that the populace can not find out the identity operator or location of a Whisper user unless the user in public give away this information , that the information Whisper shared with the US Department of Defense ’s Suicide Prevention Office did not include personal data point , and that Whisper did not stash away data outside the United States . Whisper ’s term for sharing entropy proactively with jurisprudence enforcement dominance where there is a danger of death or serious injury is both legitimate and industry standard .
Of naturally , this does n’t meant that we should take all apps that promise namelessness and privateness protection at their word and use them without scrutinizing their policies . But in this case , it ’s nice to make out that a company was n’t quite as skeezy as it looked . [ The GuardianviaWall Street Journal ]
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