Is the social media app Clubhouse safe to use?
Back in pre-liberalisation India, it wasnt unusual to pick up the telephone only to hear a conversation between two strangers. The shiniest new app on the internet, Clubhouse, is a digital and more deliberate version of the vintage wonder that was the cross connection. Only, instead of a random phone conversation, Clubhouse lets you listen in on strangers chatting on a subject of your choosing. It could be a chat featuring your favourite social media influencer or a Bollywood actor you love. It could be about anything from Left liberal bashing to K-dramas. Whatever subject interests you, Clubhouse probably has a room on it. All you have to do to enter is hand over a vast amount of personal data. Launched last year, Clubhouse promises to be an antidote to lockdown boredom. The app now has more than 2 million active users in India. Between June 1 and June 14, 80 per cent of the apps global instals were from India. These are impressive numbers, particularly since Clubhouse is an invite-only app. This means that, to join, you must be invited by an existing user. Once you have joined, you can follow other Clubhouse users and listen to live conversations in which people are usually talking over each other (or eavesdropping on someone). Among the many security concernsthese include data spillage and the data scraped from 1.3 million users being posted on a popular hackers forumis that Clubhouse keeps a temporary encrypted buffer recording of conversations. There are also rumours that Indian government agencies have been granted permission to monitor conversations on Clubhouse. The Internet Freedom Foundation has filed a Right to Information application asking about this. Clubhouses success has led to other apps rolling out their own live-audio options, like Spotifys Greenroom and Twitters Spaces. All these seek to capitalise on the growing popularity of podcasts, suggesting to listeners that interesting audio conversations and stories can be easily and cheaply produced in impromptu online gatherings. Its impossible to predict the impact of live audio on the podcast industry, but the situation feels eerily reminiscent of when free content from blogs started supplementing and replacing writing by professional critics and commentators. This practice sounded the death knell for writing as a paid profession. We can only hope listeners today are more discerning than readers and editors were in the past.