Clubhouse denies data breach report, says only publicly viewable info scraped
Paul Davison, said the claims were false during a town hall this past week, according to a report by The VergeThe data referred to was all public profile information, said Davison
PremiumNEW DELHI: Audio-based communication platform Clubhouse has said that reports about a data leak from the company are false.
While Clubhouse didn’t issue a statement on the same, the company’s chief executive, Paul Davison, said the claims were false during a town hall this past week, according to a report by The Verge. Reports of the data leak emerged over the past weekend, with claims that 1.3 million user records had been scraped off Clubhouse servers.
Also Read | The silent rise of India’s private ports
The data leak contained information like names, user ids, photo urls, usernames, Twitter and Instagram handles, followers count, and number of people a user follows and account creation date. This, as pointed out by Davison, is data that’s publicly available on the platform anyway and doesn’t amount to a data leak. “No, this is misleading and false, it is a clickbait article, we were not hacked. The data referred to was all public profile information from our app. So, the answer to that is a definitive no," he said during the town hall.
Clubhouse’s data leaks came after two data leaks from social media platforms, Facebook and LinkedIn. While the Facebook leak consisted of personal data for about 533 million users that was gathered from an older breach, the LinkedIn leak consisted of data from over 500 million users, which were scraped off the company’s servers and posted online.
Like Clubhouse, LinkedIn too said the data included “publicly viewable member profile data" scraped from the platform. “This was not a LinkedIn data breach, and no private member account data from LinkedIn was included in what we’ve been able to review," the company said in a statement.
"Exciting news! Mint is now on WhatsApp Channels 🚀 Subscribe today by clicking the link and stay updated with the latest financial insights!" Click here!
