As for clubhouse, it’s the challenge to get into. Clubhouse, the noisy audio-oriented social media app, has apparently turned the logic on its head.
Other than Twitter or Facebook, Clubhouse offers no immediate way to delete users’ accounts. Instead of an option to do so in the app itself or through the company’s website, Clubhouse’s privacy policy requires users to send a removal request to the company.
“Log in to your account or contact us (at [email protected]) if you need to change or correct your personal data, or if you want to delete your account,” it reads.
It is unclear how long it takes clubhouse to process accounts removal requests.
Unlike deleting an app from your phone, deleting an account – and any associated data – is a way to ensure that your personal information does not last long on your enterprise’s servers. This can be of particular interest to Clubhouse users, as the app requires access to your entire contact list for the purpose of sending invitations (this is the only way to get an account at the time of this writing).
As Facebook has repeatedly shown, this particular data set is particularly revealing, and questions about user privacy are now being appropriately posed to Clubhouse.
A person’s telephone contact list exposes all kinds of potentially sensitive personal information, such as therapists, doctor’s offices, rehabilitation facilities, places of worship and drug dealers.
, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, on Thursday expressed similar concerns.
“The contact list on my phone is not a list of my friends,” she said wrote. “There are people on that list that I never want to hear from and that I prefer to have no information about what I do.”
The contact list on my phone is not a list of my friends. There are people on the list that I never want to hear from and that I prefer to have no information about what I do. I would never want to send an invitation to anything to my contact list.
– Eva (@evacide) 11 February 2021
We have sent an account removal request to Clubhouse but received no immediate response.
However, if you live in California, you may be lucky. Thanks to the (CCPA), Golden State residents are extra mentioned in the app’s privacy policy. Specifically, it sets out how Californians ‘may have the right’ to know what data Clubhouse has collected about them and to request the deletion. As with any account removal request, please email [email protected].
In the last few days, the app’s privacy policy and terms of service have briefly disappeared from both the website and the app itself. Instead of getting a detailed explanation of how the company records camera audio (which it does), any interested user who clicked on ‘Privacy Policy’ in the app’s settings on Thursday was sent to a half-empty welcome page.
“Hey, we’re still opening, but anyone can join an invitation from an existing user!” read the page where the privacy policy once stood.
Not good
Image: screenshot / clubhouse
The privacy policy and terms of service are once again available on the website, without any clear changes.
SEE ALSO: This is what you need to know about Clubhouse, the social app that can only be invited
We reached out to Clubhouse to ask why the program’s privacy policy and terms of service had briefly disappeared, but only received an automated email.
This, of course, does not inspire confidence. And it should perhaps serve as a reminder that not all clubs are worth joining.