“He’s a guy that we’ll track for the rest of his life and he’ll have no idea we’ll be watching him,” the same Whisper executive said.Now the company plans to make its database and a version of its mapping tool available to select journalists in the coming months.When Guardian reporters visited Whisper last month, Zimmerman and another executive said that when they wanted to establish the location of individual users who are among the 20% who have opted out of geolocation services, they simply asked their technical staff to obtain the “latitude and longitude” of the phones they had used.One of the users that Whisper suggested the Guardian could be interested in researching, for example, claimed to be soldier who could be imminently deployed to Iraq.The user had apparently turned off their geolocation facility, denying the company permission to track them. “We had 13 or 14 soldiers who we were tracking – every whisper they did,” one Whisper executive said during the Guardian’s visit.Separately, Whisper has been following a user claiming to be a sex-obsessed lobbyist in Washington DC. To be clear: Whisper emphatically denies that it tracks users that precisely. It is among the fleet of confessional apps, such as Secret and Yik Yak, which backers say enable users to be more candid than they are on other social media platforms.To stamp out inappropriate behaviour, Whisper has an offshore base in the Philippines, where more than 100 employees screen messages 24 hours a day. What users care about is they’re anonymous to the community.Whisper CTO Chad DePue was also quick to discount the Guardian story. Other people can view and comment on the posts, and sometimes whispers posted on the application are used by news organizations, According to the newspaper, Whisper monitors the location of some of its users, even those people who have decided to opt-out of the location sharing, and can track and pinpoint specific users with location turned on to Additionally, the report claims Whisper is storing user information and post data indefinitely, even if someone believes they have been deleted, and that the company For people who turn off geo-location information, Whisper can use the poster’s IP location to discern approximate location data like a particular city, state, or country.
Some may just have an email address, while others might also use a phone’s location services to find nearby contacts. It also allows Whisper to track an individual user’s movements over time.When users have turned off their geolocation services, the company also, on a targeted, case-by-case basis, extracts their rough location from IP data emitted by their smartphone.The Guardian witnessed this practice on a three-day visit to the company’s Los Angeles headquarters last month, as part of a trip to explore the possibility of an expanded journalistic relationship with Whisper.After reviewing Whisper’s back-end tools and speaking extensively with the company’s executives, the Guardian has also established that:Whisper’s targeted monitoring of some people who use the app – even some of those who have declared they do not want to be followed by opting out of geolocation – is likely to surprise its users, who are drawn to the app by the bold promises the company makes about their anonymity.“Whisper isn’t actually about concealing identity. “The privacy of our users is not violated in any of the circumstances suggested in the Guardian story.”Whereas the previous terms and conditions described all of Whisper’s tracking of user location as “voluntary”, the new terms now warn users to “bear in mind that, even if you have disabled location services, we may still determine your city, state, and country location”.Since becoming aware that the Guardian planned to publish its story, the anonymous app has also inserted a new line into its privacy policy.It now warns users that turning on the app’s geolocation feature may “allow others, over time, to make a determination as to your identity”.Editor-in-chief reported to be placed on leave as Michael Heyward says Guardian reporting is ‘just plain wrong’Michael Heyward releases statement on Guardian revelations and says: ‘Reasonable people can disagree about online anonymity’Whisper executives have been summoned to Capitol Hill to answer questions about how the app tracks its usersUS Federal Trade Commission could examine issue of ‘anonymous’ app tracking users who have asked not to be followed From time to time, when a user makes a claim of a newsworthy nature, we review the user’s past activity to help determine veracity.”The company strongly rejected any assertion of wrongdoing. “We’re taking a break from our partnership until Whisper clarifies to us and its users the policy on user location and privacy,” a spokesperson said.In September, Whisper returned to the headlines when an apparently suicidal man in Texas used the app to broadcast messages and photographs The Guardian had previously worked with Whisper to The Guardian visited the Whisper offices to consider the possibility of undertaking other journalistic projects with the company and sent two reporters last month to look in detail at how the app operates. “The concept around Whisper is removing the concept of identity altogether, so you’re not as guarded.”Whisper, which was recently valued at over $200m, has grown rapidly since its launch two years ago. “User IP addresses may allow very coarse location to be determined to the city, state or country level.”It added: “Whisper does not request or store any personally identifiable information from users, therefore there is never a breach of anonymity. But that’s not the same thing as saying it can’t.