Clubhouse was kind of perfect for the pandemic. People do not go out and search desperately for social connections and entertainment. The app offers both in a way, while also taking advantage of the draw of well-known influencers on the platform.
It is also built on one of the most effective strategies for achieving buzz and excitement – scarcity. To join Clubhouse, you must have an invitation from someone who is already a member. Not only that, they need to have your phone number and give Clubhouse access to their iPhone contacts. No access, no invitations.
From a business standpoint, it certainly makes sense for Clubhouse to follow this approach. Creating a social graph from scratch is very difficult, and requiring users to upload their contact list is the most effective way to determine connections.
However, there is a problem. As always, the problem boils down to the right balance between protecting the privacy of the user and using data to provide the best experience for both the user and the enterprise behind the app.
In that sense, it is worth considering that Clubhouse has some policies that are not exactly privacy friendly. Even worse is the fact that you have to dig a little to even understand what those policies actually are. I reached out to Clubhouse several times, but I did not immediately get an answer to my questions about how it uses data.
Clubhouse records your sound.
One of the “features” of Clubhouse is that it is short-lived. You can not listen to it later, or even interrupt the room you are in. You must show up directly to participate in the experience. This is one thing that sets it apart from, for example, podcasts that are recorded and that we can listen to at any time. You can not even record conversations in Clubhouse.
Besides, Clubhouse can, and does, record what you say. The program’s privacy policy states that clubhouse rooms are included:
Only to support incident investigations, we temporarily record the sound in a room while the room is alive. If a user reports a breach of trust and security while the room is active, we retain the sound to investigate the incident, and then remove it when the investigation is complete. If no incident is reported in a room, we remove the temporary sound recording when the room ends.
This means that if someone does report a problem, everything that happened in the room is recorded and stored. And Clubhouse is not clear on what’s going on with it, except that it’s stored so the company can make a decision. It does not say who can listen to it or under what circumstances.
2. You can not delete information that other people share about you.
Even if you have not yet created an account, there is a good chance that Clubhouse already has your phone number as someone you know. This is because the app encourages users to upload their entire contact database to send invitations. You can only invite someone who’s in your contacts, and that does not include the ability to share only specific contacts. It’s all or nothing.
In addition, the friends may not only have shared their contact list, but if they link to their social media profiles, the information is also collected. Clubhouse specifically states that when you create and / or verify with a third party service such as Twitter, we may collect, store and from time to time update information related to the third party account, such as your lists of friends or followers. “
What if you have no interest in clubhouse at all? There is still no mechanism to have personal information about you, either via a phone number or via other social media networks like Twitter or Instagram.
3. You can not just delete your account.
Even if you have an account, you can not delete it without sending an email to a support account. There is no option in your app to delete your account, nor are there any instructions on what to do if you want to delete it. You should send an email to “[email protected]” requesting that your account be canceled, and wait for someone to act.
4. They may share your personal information without notifying you.
One of the biggest questions surrounding Clubhouse is how it intends to eventually make money. If you look through the privacy policy, it is clear that it is likely to involve some form of advertising or sponsorship systems. To prepare for this, Clubhouse makes it clear that it can ‘share personal information with our current and future subsidiaries’.
That’s fine, but the same section makes it clear that Clubhouse ‘may share the categories of Personal Information above without further notice to you.’ This means that you have no right to know that your personal information collected by Clubhouse is now being used outside Clubhouse.
5. Clubhouse keeps an eye on you.
The privacy policy states that it uses cookies, pixels and tracking technologies to monitor what you do in Clubhouse and on the internet, even though they do not currently earn money from the app. This is confirmed both by the privacy policy, as well as traffic monitoring, which shows that it uses activity tracking and analysis tools to understand what you are doing with the app.
The company’s privacy policy also explicitly states:
We may share Identification and Internet Activity Data with social media platforms and other advertising partners who will use the information to serve your targeted ads on social media platforms and other third party websites – under certain regulations such sharing may be a “sale” of Personal Data.
It seems pretty clear that Clubhouse is ready to make money from the platform he is building. It’s fair – every business should have a plan to make money. If the plan makes money for the activity and data of users, I think we can all agree that it should be upfront and transparent.