The American audio app Clubhouse said Saturday that it is reviewing its privacy practices after a report from the Stanford Internet Observatory found security vulnerabilities that made users’ data vulnerable to access by the Chinese government.
Clubhouse, the invite-only audio chat app, grew in popularity during the coronavirus pandemic when people couldn’t get together in person. Now the former niche platform has much higher goals.
The clubhouse, which was founded less than a year ago and recently encountered censorship problems in China, aims to establish itself as the standard carrier for digital audio.
Also read: Chinese users flock to the US chat app Clubhouse to get out of the censorship
In addition to occasional discussions about travel and health, users openly discussed Uighur concentration camps in Xinjiang, the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, and personal experience of being questioned by the police. But her access to the app was blocked last week, creating frustration and fear of government surveillance.
The app said in a response to the study published by the Stanford University research group that while some people had chosen not to make the app available in China, some people had found a workaround to download the app, which meant that it was a conversation. Part of could be transmitted via Chinese servers.
“With the help of researchers at the Stanford Internet Observatory, we have identified some areas in which we can further strengthen our privacy,” said the company in a statement released by the research group on Friday.
“Over the next 72 hours, we’re rolling out changes to add additional encryption and blocking to prevent clubhouse clients from ever pinging Chinese servers. We’re also planning to hire an outside data security firm to review and validate these changes validate. “
Also read | Clubhouse: The invite-only chat app that Elon Musk uses
Launched in early 2020, the app saw a surge in global user numbers earlier this month after Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev had a surprising discussion on the platform.
The Stanford Internet Observatory announced that it has confirmed that Chinese tech company Agora Inc supplied the back-end infrastructure to Clubhouse and that Agora will likely have access to users’ raw data, which may provide access to the Chinese government.
It was also found to observe room metadata being routed to servers believed to be hosted in China and audio to servers managed by Chinese companies. However, it added that it believed the Chinese government would not be able to access the data if the audio were stored in the US.
