Heyward and his co-founder, longtime colleague and friend Brad Brooks, launched the app in 2012. “Whisper was designed to give people a place to share things that they normally wouldn’t have an outlet for.” (The app is similar to the now-defunct PostSecret.) “Facebook is very much ego-based content it’s all about ‘Look at me! Let me show you how great my life is!’” Heyward says. Whisper is the brainchild of Michael Heyward, a 20-something techie who was tired of the lack of authenticity on Facebook and saw a gap in the market. “Whenever I’m on a train, I like to look out the window and cry a little so I can fee like I’m in a Lifetime movie.” “I work in a pet shop and secretly let all the hamsters free.” “Orange is the New Black has made me question my sexuality.”
“I didn’t get dressed until 3pm today … I’m okay with that.” So what exactly are people posting on Whisper? Here are a few examples: Just like Facebook, users can also interact with each other by replying to posts. Just create a user name (not your real name), and you can post anything you’re thinking about the app will furnish a related illustration or photo to be featured as the backdrop to your words. How popular? According to the company, the site attracts more than 6 billion page views per month. It’s called Whisper, and the site and its accompanying app are insanely popular. The database was taken down Monday (March 9) after The Washington Post contacted Whisper, although Ehrlich and Porter said they had also done so earlier.For many of us, Facebook functions as a billboard for all the wonderful things in our lives-the pregnancies, marriage proposals, vacations, babies and shameless work brags.īut what about the thoughts that we're too afraid or embarrassed or ashamed or nervous to share? Wouldn’t it be great if there were an anonymous social network where we could say whatever we wanted, without the fear of tarnishing our image? The other upside, if it can be called that, is that there's no evidence that the database was discovered or exploited by anyone before Porter and Ehrlich found it. The only real risk of a Whisper post being traced back to you has to do with the precise location data, which might reveal which high school you attended in 2014. Likewise, most of the background images on the posts came from Whisper's own image library. The "nicknames" were the usernames the users created to be able to post, or were assigned randomly by the Whisper app.
So let's be clear: No real names, no dates of birth. "A search of users who had listed their age as 15 returned 1.3 million results," grimly notes The Post, but that isn't surprising as the app was especially popular among teens during its heyday. The database simply collates it all into an easy-to-search format. Most of the metadata in the exposed database is and was publicly displayed on the Whisper app. Ehrlich pointed out that plenty of posts could be traced back to specific schools and offices. Precise location collection is not what you want to see in an app devoted to eliciting secret confessions from its users. We have no way to assess the validity of those accusations, but Ehrlich pointed out that The Guardian in 2014 showed that Whisper could tell from GPS coordinates which posts came from military bases, the Pentagon and even the White House. In two blog postings today (March 11), Ehrlich accused Whisper staffers of being "spies for the Chinese Ministry of State Security" and implies that a lot of the data Whisper collected is being used to blackmail members of the U.S. The exposed Whisper data goes back to 2012, the year Whisper was started. The unprotected database was found by Dan Ehrlich and Matthew Porter, researchers from security firm Twelve Security.
#HACK WHISPER APP UPDATE#
We've reached out to Medialab for comment and will update this story when we receive a reply. Whisper is owned by Medialab, a holding company that also owns the teen-chat app Kik and the hip-hop-oriented website and social app DatPiff. It's sort of a full-page equivalent of all those trashy ads you see pop up at the bottom of news websites, with topics like "Ladies Confess: I Am Dating A Trust Fund Baby" and "18 People Who Shockingly Lied Under Oath". You can still lurk on Whisper by going to the unintentionally hilarious Whisper website. The app collects "precise location (GPS and network-based)", according to the device permissions listed on its Google Play Store page, which tells Whisper (and any mobile ad networks it runs) exactly where you are.
#HACK WHISPER APP ANDROID#
If you've got Whisper installed on your iPhone or Android phone, it might be best to just delete it.
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