The increasingly popular, invitation-only chat app Clubhouse could be profiting from surveillance capitalism, a market-driven process where the commodity for sale is your personal data.
In the age of surveillance capitalism, companies race to collect data in pursuit of Facebook- or Google-like profits, according to tech critic and Harvard Business School Prof. Shoshana Zuboff, New York Magazine reported.
Zuboff wrote the book, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.”
“Surveillance capitalism” describes a scenario where the capture and production of your personal data rely on mass surveillance of the Internet. “This activity is often carried out by companies that provide us with free online services, such as search engines (Google) and social media platforms (Facebook),” The Conversation reported.
By collecting user information, companies can analyze online behavior — likes, dislikes, searches, social networks, purchases — to produce data that can then be used to sell us more stuff.
Here are three things to know about Clubhouse data acquisition and how it uses your contact list.
Clubhouse, an audio-only social network, allows members to gather in virtual rooms and listen to one another speak.
After you are accepted as a member, you can invite two other people to join. From the get-go, Clubhouse is all up in your business — as well as that of your contacts.
As part of the sign-up process, Clubhouse urges you to give it access to your phone’s contacts, so you can connect with other users of the social network. But the access isn’t really for that reason; Clubhouse is using your contact information to build profiles of people who aren’t even yet members, Forbes reported.
Then, Clubhouse checks how many times your contacts appear in the contacts of other Clubhouse members. It’s called creating a “Shadow profile,” and other social networks, like Facebook, also practice this.
Privacy advocates are calling out Clubhouse for violating users’ privacy.
“As a company, you cannot use personal data provided by a third party unless that data has been provided lawfully and … unless there is consent, disclosure of personal data in this way is not lawful,” said Alexander Hanff, a privacy advocate and co-founder of SynData AB.
Will Oremus writes about platforms, algorithms, online speech and tech policy. If you don’t share your contacts, you lose the ability to invite more than the initial two people you’re allotted, Oremus reported for OneZero.
Oremus tweeted, “Clubhouse is pressuring users to upload their contacts, prompting them to join welcome rooms with their former bosses and exes, and suggesting they invite their therapists, deceased grand-aunts, and 10-year-old phone cards.”
Clubhouse also gives you suggestions on who you should invite, based on your contact list. This could be dicey — or dangerous.
“When you upload those numbers, not only are you telling the app developer that you’re connected to those people, but you’re also telling it that those people are connected to you — which they might or might not have wanted the app to know. For example, say you have an ex or even a harasser you’ve tried to block from your life, but they still have your number in their phone; if they upload their contacts, Clubhouse will know you’re connected to them and make recommendations on that basis,” Oremus pointed out.
Oremus posted his experience when he asked Clubhouse exactly what data it collects on your contacts, how it uses that data, what data it’s storing on people who aren’t even on Clubhouse — “like your weed dealer who it somehow knows has 83 friends on Clubhouse,” Oremus tweeted. “The company did not respond.”
A Clubhouse user responded, “Good story. I un-gave CH my contacts as soon as I saw that creepy ranked list.”
Clubhouse records and keeps the voice chats that are taking place on the service. According to its community guidelines, “Solely for the purpose of supporting incident investigations, we temporarily record the audio in a room while the room is live.”
It continues: “If a user reports a Trust and Safety violation while the room is active, we retain the audio for the purposes of investigating the incident, and then delete it when the investigation is complete. If no incident is reported in a room, we delete the temporary audio recording when the room ends.”
If Clubhouse is recording the conversations in the room for investigative purposes, clearly the audio messages are not end-to-end encrypted, Hanff told Forbes.
People who give away all their contacts to Clubhouse can also be considered privacy violators. “The issue is not whether those who join protect their own privacy but whether they are willing to breach the privacy of their contacts,” ethics consultant Dorothea Baur wrote in a blog. Bauer consults on ethics, responsibility, and sustainability in finance and technology.
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Once you agree to share your contact, Clubhouse assumes it has the OK to set up shadow profiles for your contacts.
“At least those who organize events on Clubhouse to increase their professional visibility and to promote their content are likely to gain from the privacy violations of other people,” Baur wrote. “They benefit from an audience that would be significantly smaller if no one had violated the privacy of their contacts.”
A Twitter user posted this by way of a warning: “I’ve never hit YES to share contacts with any app in my life because I don’t give random people phone numbers of my friends and family.”
