You have been invited to the Clubhouse, but your privacy has not.
Clubhouse has millions of users, millions of dollars, and very few privacy options.
Got an invite to join Clubhouse, the invite-only app everyone seems to be talking about? Before you decide to join the cool kids club, you may want to think about who will see you there, even if you take all available measures to keep your contacts private.
Clubhouse is an audio app (still in beta) that allows users to create and join rooms where all kinds of topics are discussed, you can join talking events or you can create your own chat room. There is also a big social component: you follow people, people follow you, and Clubhouse strongly encourages these networks to form and grow. As OneZero's Will Oremus reported Thursday, this has led to some privacy issues that some Clubhouse users didn't expect and couldn't avoid, given the app's lack of privacy controls or information about them.
The core part of Clubhouse's user recommendation engine relies on accessing your contacts. You can't actually invite anyone else to the platform if you don't give them access to your contacts. If you give the app access to your contacts, Clubhouse will show you everyone in your contact list who is also in the Clubhouse. It will also prompt you to invite those who are not and notify you as soon as someone joins your contacts so you can welcome them.
But what if you don't give Clubhouse access to your contacts, especially because you don't want all or any of them to know you're there? I'm sorry to inform you that the Clubhouse has let them know anyway, encourage them to follow you, and there's not much you can do about it. When I joined, I did not give the Clubhouse access to my contacts, as it had been my policy since childhood. Only I can decide who enters my club. However, after a few minutes, I had a bunch of followers from my contacts. Worse yet: I have followers who weren't in my contacts at all, but I was in theirs.
It turns out that your privacy in the Clubhouse depends not only on what you do but also on what those who have your information do in their contacts. At the moment, you can only get an invite to the Clubhouse through your phone number, which is attached to your account and cannot be removed. So if someone has your phone number in their contacts, and the Clubhouse has granted access to those contacts, they will 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 could be another way to find people (or people to find you). Clubhouse did not respond to a request for comment on whether or not the app does this, but this is something to consider before linking your social media accounts.
To be clear, Clubhouse isn't the only app that's excessive in calling recommendations. A lot of social media platforms use algorithms that take into account various factors, including your personal data and your contacts, to suggest people you should be friends with or follow. These algorithms are very powerful, but not powerful enough to avoid making scary recommendations.
Remember all those stories about Facebook's "People You May Know" feature that psychiatrists recommended to their patients or random people who just walked across the street to each other? Facebook has admitted that it recommended people based on their contacts, even if they weren't in your contacts. But Facebook, which is hardly a shining beacon of best practices when it comes to privacy, now has a bunch 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.
There are currently no such privacy options for the Clubhouse. In fact, the only mention of privacy I could find on the app was a link to its privacy policy, which for most of Thursday looked like this:
The Clubhouse settings page seems to have some errors. Sometimes the link led to a redirect to a real privacy policy, but most of the time it didn't. This was also true for What's New, FAQ, Community Guidelines, and Terms of Service.
While the app also has some abuse prevention measures — the ability to block users, make rooms private, and report incidents — Clubhouse has been criticized for having weak or inadequate moderation tools that allow misinformation and hate speech to spread. The company says it is working on improving it. At the same time, you cannot currently report potential violations of these Terms without submitting your email address.
It's not clear why Clubhouse doesn't have better options for users to manage their privacy or more information for users about how their data is used or associated with them. The company reportedly works with only a handful of employees, but also has millions of users, millions of dollars in funding from major Silicon Valley venture capital firms, including Andreessen Horowitz, and a $1 billion valuation. It is not the first well-funded social media app to push the boundaries of data privacy.
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