"Clubhouse, You Should Assume Recordings Are Made"…Chinese Company Handles Data Processing

Stanford Internet Observatory Claims
Ongoing Concerns Over Privacy Protection

Clubhouse app icon

Security concerns are growing over the voice-based social media app 'Clubhouse,' which has recently gained popularity. Clubhouse is an app where multiple people gather in a room to have voice conversations, and participation is by invitation only.

The Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) pointed out on the 21st (local time) that "Clubhouse users should assume their conversations are being recorded," according to a report by U.S. news agency Bloomberg.

The SIO, a research program on information technology abuse at Stanford University's Cyber Policy Center, stated, "Clubhouse cannot provide privacy guarantees for conversations."

Earlier, on the 13th, SIO revealed that Clubhouse entrusts back-end operations such as data traffic handling to a Chinese company, Agora Inc., and that Clubhouse metadata is believed to be transmitted to servers hosted in China.

In response, Agora claimed, "We do not store or share personally identifiable information."

Additionally, a Clubhouse spokesperson said that new safety measures have been implemented to prevent recurrence of security concerns.

However, experts reacted negatively to Clubhouse's promises to prevent recurrence, noting that conversations and metadata were still found to be moving elsewhere over the weekend.

Robert Potter, CEO of Australian cybersecurity firm Internet 2.0, said, "(Clubhouse users) believing their conversations are private is a major problem."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.