What to know about privacy before accepting a clubhouse invitation

Got an invitation to join Clubhouse, the invitation-only app that everyone seemingly is talking about? Before you decide to join the cool kid’s club, you may want to consider who will see you there, even if you take all possible measures to keep your contacts private.

Clubhouse is an audio-based app (still in beta) that allows users to create and join rooms that discuss a variety of topics. You can participate in speaking events or create your own room to chat. There’s a big social component too: you follow people, people follow you, and Clubhouse greatly encourages these networks to form and grow. And as OneZero’s Will Oremus reported Thursday, that has led to a few privacy concerns that some clubhouse users have not anticipated and cannot avoid, given the lack of privacy controls or information about them in the app.

The most important part of the Clubhouse user recommendation engine relies on accessing your contacts. You can’t actually invite anyone else to the platform if you don’t allow it. If you give the app access to your contacts, Clubhouse will show everyone on your contact list who is also on Clubhouse. It will also urge you to invite those who aren’t and let you know as soon as someone in your contacts has joined so you can say goodbye to them. This is all pretty standard for an app trying to recruit new users.

But what if you don’t give Clubhouse access to your contacts, especially because you don’t want them all or any of them to know you’re there? I am sorry to inform you that Clubhouse made it possible for them to know, encourage them to follow you, and there is not much you can do about it. When I joined, I did not give Clubhouse access to my contacts; as has been my policy since childhood, only I get to decide who enters my clubhouse. Still, a few minutes later I had a ton of followers from my contacts. Worse still, I got followers who weren’t in my contacts at all, but I was in theirs.

As it turns out, your privacy on Clubhouse depends not only on what you do, but also what those who have your information in their contacts do. For now, you can only be invited to Clubhouse through your phone number, which is associated with your account and cannot be deleted. So if someone has your phone number in their contacts, and they’ve given Clubhouse access to those contacts, they’ll get a notification when you join the app and a recommendation to follow you.

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

To be clear, Clubhouse isn’t the only app to be overly aggressive with its connection recommendations. Many social media platforms use algorithms that take into account a variety of factors, including your personal information and your contacts, to suggest people to whom you should follow. Those algorithms are very powerful, yet somehow not powerful enough to avoid making recommendations that are scary.

Do you remember all those stories about Facebook’s “People You May Know” feature that psychiatrists recommend to their patients or random people they ran into on the street? Facebook admitted that it recommended people based on their contacts, even if they weren’t in yours. But Facebook, which is hardly a shining beacon of best practices when it comes to privacy, now has a ton of settings and ways to keep your profile reasonably locked if you want to. You also don’t have to associate your phone number with your Facebook profile.

Such privacy options do not currently exist on Clubhouse. In fact, the only privacy statement I could find in the app was a link to the privacy policy, which looked like this for most of Thursday:

Clubhouse

The clubhouse settings page seems to be having some issues. Sometimes the link led to a redirect to a real privacy policy, but usually not. This also applied to the new features, FAQs, community guidelines, and terms of service. (Clubhouse also did not respond to a request for comment on what was going on here.)

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

It is not clear why Clubhouse does not have better options for users to manage their privacy or more information for users about how their data can be used or associated with it. The company reportedly operates with a small staff, but it also has millions of users and millions of dollars in funding from major Silicon Valley venture capital firms, including Andreessen Horowitz, and a valuation of $ 1 billion. It’s not the first well-funded social media app to push the boundaries of data privacy. But at least you would think Clubhouse would have learned from the unicorns that came before it.

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