During this weekend, a user has managed to divert the audio from some Clubhouse rooms to a third-party website. This violates the rules of the application, where it is completely prohibited to store, distribute or share the content outside of the application.
As Bloomberg points out, the unidentified user who broke the rules was expelled from the platform. To get the job done, he built his own system around the JavaScript toolkit used to compile the Clubhouse application.
The act not only affects the privacy of users who go to the different rooms and think that their conversations are private. Also to the reputation of the application, since the expiration of its contents is one of its main differential factors.
Only Clubhouse can record recordings to improve the experience of the application itself and, in some cases, observe inappropriate behavior.
On the other hand, a few days ago, Alex Stamos, director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and former head of security for Facebook, already warned that “Clubhouse can not offer any promise about the privacy of conversations held anywhere in the world.”
The Stamos team has also confirmed that Clubhouse relies on a Chinese startup called Agora Inc. It handles much of the back-end operations , including processing of app-derived traffic and audio. Although the company itself claims that they are committed to the safety of their products, there is some suspicion around Chinese government surveillance and possible access to content under the pretext of national security.
Clubhouse is currently only available on iOS devices by prior invitation. This measure allows to achieve a more organic growth without saturating the servers — currently very limited. The purpose of the application is quite clear: to participate exclusively in live conversations.
