With $60 million in venture capital funding and about 70 employees, Whisper has a lot to deliver on.īut the media backlash against Whisper highlights the unique set of privacy challenges it faces as a media operation - a content creator - as opposed to simply a social network like Facebook or Twitter. Whisper was launched two years ago as a platform for people to express themselves without having to worry about tailoring messages to cultivate followers and likes or exude coolness. Those portraits could offer enough clues to come up with a real name based off public records. That allows Whisper to build a portrait of who's using the app on that phone or tablet by tracking their interactions with the app. The problem is Whisper does collect the unique code of a user's mobile device.

Whisper uses the data to defend against spam, deduce time zones for deciding when to send push alerts and personalize content, the company's chief technology officer said. Monitoring IP addresses is common for online services. When opening the anonymous message board app Whisper on an iOS device for the first time, users are twice prompted to allow the Los Angeles startup to determine their pinpoint location so they can view posts shared by people nearby.īut the Guardian reported Thursday that Whisper collects IP addresses and therefore continues to generally track even the thin slice of users who don't consent to sharing location data.

Whisper app anonymous