What to know about privacy before accepting a Clubhouse invitation

Did you receive an invitation to join the Clubhouse, the invitation-only app that apparently everyone is talking about? Before you decide to join the legal kids club, you may want to consider who will see you there, even if you take all the steps available to keep your contacts private.

Clubhouse is an audio-based application (still in beta) that allows users to create and join rooms where all types of topics are discussed. You can participate in lecture events or you can create your own chat room. There is also a big social component: you follow people, people follow you and the Clubhouse strongly encourages these networks to form and grow. And, as OneZero’s Will Oremus reported on Thursday, this has led to some privacy issues that some Clubhouse users did not expect and cannot avoid, given the lack of privacy controls or information about them in the app.

The centerpiece of the Clubhouse user recommendation engine depends on access to your contacts. In fact, you can’t invite anyone to the platform if you don’t grant it. If you allow the app to access your contacts, Clubhouse will show you everyone on your list of contacts who are also in the Clubhouse. He will also ask you to invite those who are not and let you know as soon as someone from your contacts comes in so you can greet him. This is all quite normal for an application that tries to gain new users.

But what if you didn’t give the Clubhouse access to your contacts, specifically because you didn’t want everyone or any of them to know that you were there? I am sorry to inform you that the Clubhouse has made it possible for them to know anyway, encourages them to follow you and there is not much you can do about it. When I joined, I didn’t give the Clubhouse access to my contacts; as it has been my policy since childhood, only I can decide who joins my club. However, a few minutes later, I had a lot of followers from my contacts. Worse, I got followers who weren’t in my contacts – but I was in theirs.

It turns out that your privacy at the Clubhouse depends not only on what you do, but also on what those who have your information in their contacts do. For now, you can only be invited to the Clubhouse through your phone number, which is attached to your account and cannot be removed. Therefore, if someone has your phone number in their contacts and grants those contacts access to the Clubhouse, they will receive a notification when you sign in and a recommendation to follow you.

Clubhouse also encourages you to connect your Twitter and Instagram accounts, which can be another way for you to find people (or people to find you). The Clubhouse did not respond to a request for comment on whether or how the app does this, but it is something to consider before connecting your social media accounts.

To be clear, Clubhouse is not the only app that is overly aggressive with its connection recommendations. Many social media platforms use algorithms that take several factors into account, including your personal data and contacts, to suggest people you should be friends with or follow. These algorithms are very powerful, but somehow, not enough to avoid making scary recommendations.

Remember all those stories about Facebook’s “People You May Know” feature that recommended psychiatrists to their patients or random people they passed by on the street? Facebook admitted that it recommended people based on their contacts, even if they weren’t in theirs. But Facebook, which is hardly a bright beacon of best practices when it comes to privacy, now has a lot of settings and ways to keep your profile reasonably blocked, if you want. You also don’t have to link your phone number to your Facebook profile.

These privacy options do not currently exist at the Clubhouse. In fact, the only mention of privacy I was able to find in the app was a link to its privacy policy, which, for most of Thursday, looked like this:

Clubhouse

The Clubhouse settings page appears to have some flaws. Sometimes, the link led to a redirect to a real privacy policy, but most of the time it didn’t. This also applies to News, FAQs, Community Guidelines and Terms of Service. (The Clubhouse also did not respond to a request for comment on what was happening here.)

While the app also has some measures to prevent abuse – the ability to block users, make rooms private and report incidents – the Clubhouse has been criticized for having weak or inappropriate moderation tools that allow misinformation and hate speech to spread. The company says it is working to improve them. In the meantime, you cannot report possible violations of these terms without providing your email address.

It is not clear why the Clubhouse has no better options for users to manage their privacy or more information for users about how their data can be used or linked to them. The company is operating with a small team, but it also has millions of users and millions of dollars in financing from major Silicon Valley venture capital firms, including Andreessen Horowitz, and a $ 1 billion valuation. It is not the first well-funded social media app to push the boundaries of data privacy. But you would at least think that the Clubhouse would have learned from the unicorns that came before it.

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