What you need to know about privacy before accepting a clubhouse invitation

Did you get an invitation to join Clubhouse, the invitation app that everyone seems to be talking about? Before you decide to join the cool kids club, you can consider who you will see there, even if you take all available measures to keep your contacts private.

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

The primary part of Clubhouse’s user recommendation engine depends on access to your contacts. You can actually not invite anyone else to the platform if you do not allow it. If you do give the app access to your contacts, Clubhouse will show you everyone on your contact list who is also on Clubhouse. It will also encourage you to invite those who are not and let them know once someone has joined your contacts so you can greet them. This is all pretty standard for an app trying to get new users.

But what if you did not give Clubhouse access to your contacts, specifically because you did not want everyone or any of them to know you were there? I regret that you informed that Clubhouse made it possible for them to know anyway, 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 my policy was from a young age, only I may decide who enters my clubhouse. Nevertheless, a few minutes later I had a bunch of followers of my contacts. Worse: I got followers who were not in my contacts at all – but I was in theirs.

It turns out that your privacy at Clubhouse depends not only on what you do, but also on what those who have information in their contacts do. For now, you can only be invited to Clubhouse via your phone number that is linked to your account and cannot be removed. So if someone has your phone number in their contacts, and their Clubhouse has access to the contacts, they will receive 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 to find people (or people around you). Clubhouse has not responded to a request for comment on whether or how the app does this, but it is important to consider before linking your social media accounts.

To be clear, Clubhouse is not the only app that is too aggressive with its recommendations on connections. Many social media platforms use algorithms that take into account various factors, including your personal data and your contacts, to suggest people you should friend or follow. These algorithms are very powerful, and yet somehow not powerful enough to prevent recommendations that are whimsical.

Do you remember all the stories about Facebook’s “People You May Know” feature that psychiatrists recommend for their patients or random people passing by them on the street? Facebook has admitted that it recommends people based on their contacts, even if they are not with you. But Facebook, which is hardly a shiny beacon of best practices when it comes to privacy, now has a bunch of settings and ways to keep your profile fairly locked out if you want it to. You also do not have to link your phone number to your Facebook profile.

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

Clubhouse

The clubhouse settings page apparently has some errors. Sometimes the link led to a redirect to a real privacy policy, but mostly not. This also applies to the What’s new, questions, community guidelines and terms of service. (Clubhouse also did not respond to a request for comment on what is going on here.)

While the app also has some anti-abuse measures – the ability to block users, make rooms private and report incidents – Clubhouse has been criticized for having poor or inadequate moderation tools that spread misinformation and hate speech. The company says work is being done to improve it. In the meantime, you are not able to report any possible violations of these terms without entering your email address.

It’s not clear why Clubhouse does not have better options for users to manage their privacy, or more information for users on how their data can be used or linked to. The company reportedly works with a small staff, but also has millions of users and millions of dollars in funding from large companies in Silicon Valley, 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 you would at least think that Clubhouse would have learned from the unicorns that came before it.

Open source is made possible by Omidyar Network. All open source content is editorially independent and is produced by our journalists.