Clubhouse’s security and privacy lag behind its explosive growth | Hacker News Reader

Clubhouse’s security and privacy lag behind its explosive growth

arstechnica.com

42 pointsa-human27 comments

“People can use the platform without the liability that their contributions will be automatically saved as posts. This can embolden some users to make abusive or derogatory remarks, thinking they won't be recorded and won't face consequences.”

Incredibly disappointing to see Ars jumping on this bandwagon. People are having ephemeral conversations that censors can’t police after the fact. Truly, the horror!

I really hope that in the near future, we can look back at this period as a moment of temporary cultural insanity.

Plenty of public hysterias not so past distance. I remember when American conservatives cried about Satanists recruiting young people online, this feels so very similar.

> ephemeral conversations that censors can’t police after the fact

The ephemeral part is what's crazy. We've moved from "speech is fine as long as it doesn't lead to violence" to "speech itself is violence when certain people hear it" to "it doesn't matter if anyone hears it, you saying it privately is violence."

It's thoughtcrime.

Don't let your kids tell their teachers that you told your wife that you only believe there are two sexes while you were alone in the kitchen. That kind of problematic belief is cause for bringing in CPS to take the kids away to be raised in the foster program

Why would you tell your wife that intersex people don't exist?

Devil's advocate: How are you going to determine if speech led to violence without a record of it?

We now know the effects of not being relaxed on this, of course we’re now going to overcompensate

Are you arguing that private conversations, ones not terribly different than private phone calls, led to Trump (I assume Trump is "the effects" but you're not very specific or clear about what "this" is or what "the effects" are, so your comment seems like a dog whistle to some group I'm not in (I'm not a dog)), and therefore it's expected that private conversations now be censored?

I mean seriously why don't we call in the censors to the plain old telephone system? I'm sure lots of people express "problematic" ideas privately in phone calls to trusted people. Why not start cancelling people based on those conversations?

"We now know the effects of being relaxed on" allowing people to have private conversations! Anything less than censoring people on private phone calls would be supporting fascism.

Clubhouse is an excellent example of a kill privacy by design system. Unethical business model, sell user data including recorded chats, do not tell users upfront to who you sell their data and every security principle of the last 25 years is missed. Blaming the bad anti-scraping mechanisms is far too simple. But apparently people using apps do think differently regarding privacy and freedom.

It's crazy how so many red flags are showing up already. I mean like super simple stuff that anyone can catch and they are the love of the VCs right now. It goes to show that no one cares how the sausage is made.

> sell user data including recorded chats

Where is the evidence of this?

Most people I have spoken to assume they’ll use a ‘super follow’ style of monetization, like substack or what Twitter is just introducing.

This headline could have been written about nearly any consumer app in the last 10 years. No one is taking privacy or security seriously when it's a company of 5 people trying to scale their app to 100 million users after VCs sunk $10M in seed funding with an expected 10x growth rate in 6 months.

Security will never be a priority until someone in that chain (VCs, founders, etc.) is incentivized to prioritize it.

As someone who has always worked in businesses, with 'organic' growth, producing physical hardware as well that software that runs on it, I find it absolutely mind blowing that there are examples of teams of 5x able to round up 10M in seed rounds.

It really speaks volumes of the difference between SV, Seattle, New York, versus the rest of the world. I mean at that early stage, the amount of assurances and collateral you would need for that kind of funding would be prohibitive anywhere else.

Yes, sometimes it seems that way but I think we should be careful about excusing this sort of thing that way.

For years before Trump I heard many say "all politicians lie" which is clearly not literally true, but became an excuse for not finding and rewarding the honest ones.

Or, "all the media outlets are crap" is used as an excuse to just read whatever pandering crap one wants to be true and to stop even trying to find quality media.

And (IMO) look where that has led us.

I would clarify this as, all politicians do lie, including Trump, because truth is not black and white, and people often speak in inconsistencies. So a single lie should not become a litmus test to disqualify any candidate, and instead we should overweight their post statement reaction (the "empty apology") much more than we do now.

This was also true of Zoom, especially all the drama that happened as lockdowns and WFH were rolled out in early 20202. (Though security issues were reported in Zoom previous to that.)

Clubhouse will get lots of people cancelled in the future, because it feels like a private conversation, but nobody knows who is recording.

I have heared people confess cheating on their partner, tactics to get close to the C*Os to get promoted as a woman, and lots of other supposedly ephemeral, interesting talks.

I think it's a great app, but people should stay professional and treat anything they say as public information that may be used against them 30 years later.

I seriously don’t think those people care. I was shocked by the number rooms dedicated to “having a side chick” and con mans trying to sell you snake oil. It felt like the audio version of reality tv.

Isn't it what was said about Zoom some 10 months ago?

I downloaded it and tried to sign up, but then it asked me to enter my mobile number.

Instant turn off.

Why do I need to register with my mobile number?

I prefer to register with an email address.

At some point people on HN have to recognize that we’re almost reverse predictors of mainstream popularity. I’d prefer email too, but....clubhouse is social, and on a phone. How do people message each other on a phone, and how do they store contacts? Via phone number.

How comfortable are people giving phone numbers? Super comfortable! Just look at the growth. And then it is frictionless to invite friends.

Friction is the killer of anything that aspires to be popular. This does have rough implications for security and privacy, but those can come later once growth is achieved.

Yes, you're right, most people don't care about this.

But what is clubhouse using the mobile number for?

So people can message each other using that number? I doubt it.

Surely it has in app messaging?

And in terms of frictionless, the easiest would have been to generate an automatic ID and let the user choose a username.

Typing in an email address or phone number takes the same amount of effort I would assume.

I can't speak with any authority on Clubhouse but I imagine it uses mobile numbers to create a social graph exactly like Signal does. A robust social graph seems like an important prerequisite to any successful social network and our phonebooks are one of the oldest social graphs present.

No in app messaging. It uses the phone number to send a text or iMessage invite to your contact.

Clubhouse is presently invite only. So you have one tap invites.

Thanks for clarifying.

It would help if they'd clarified that on the first step of registration, e.g. 'Hey, we need your number so you can message other clubhouse members and also invite your friends.' or something like that.

Seems overblown.

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