INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Houseparty has been a smashing success with people staying home during the coronavirus pandemic who still want to connect with friends.
The
group video chat app, interspersed with games and other bells and whistles, raises it above the more mundane Zooms and Hangouts (fun only in
their names, otherwise pretty serious tools used by companies, schools and others who just need to work) when it comes to creating engaged
leisure time, amid a climate where all of them are seeing a huge surge in growth.
All that looked like it could possibly fall apart for
Houseparty and its new owner Epic Games when a series of reports appeared Monday claiming Houseparty was breached, and that malicious
hackers were using users& data to access their accounts on other apps such as Spotify and Netflix.
Houseparty was swift to deny the reports
and even go so far as to claim — without evidence — it was investigating indications that the &breach& was a &paid commercial smear to
harm Houseparty,& offering a $1 million reward to whoever could prove its theory.
For now, there is no proof that there was a breach, nor
proof that there was a paid smear campaign, and when we reached out to ask Houseparty and Epic about this investigation, a spokesperson
said: &We don&t have anything to add here at the moment.&
But that doesn&t mean that Houseparty doesn&t have privacy issues.
As the old
saying goes, &if the product is free, you are the product.& In the case of the free app Houseparty, the publishers detail a 12,000+ word
privacy policy that covers any and all uses of data that it might collect by way of you logging on to or using its service, laying out the
many ways that it might use data for promotional or commercial purposes.
There are some clear lines in the policy about what it won&t use
For example, while phone numbers might get shared for tech support, with partnerships that you opt into, to link up contacts to talk with
and to authenticate you, &we will never share your phone number or the phone numbers of third parties in your contacts with anyone
else.&
But beyond that, there are provisions in there that could see Houseparty selling anonymized and other data, leading Ray Walsh of
research firm ProPrivacy to describe it as a &privacy nightmare.&
&Anybody who decides to use the Houseparty application to stay in contact
during quarantine needs to be aware that the app collects a worrying amount of personal information,& he said
&This includes geolocation data, which could, in theory, be used to map the location of each user
A closer look at Houseparty&sprivacy policy reveals that the firm promises to anonymize and aggregate data before it is shared with the
third-party affiliates and partners it works with
However, time and time again, researchers have proven that previously anonymized data can be re-identified.&
There are ways around this for
Walsh notes that users can go into the settings to select &private mode& to &lock& rooms they use to stop people from joining unannounced or
uninvited; switch locations off; use fake names and birthdates; disconnect all other social apps; and launch the app on iOS with a long
press to &sneak into the house& without notifying all your contacts.
But with a consumer app, it a longshot to assume that most people, and
the younger users who are especially interested in Houseparty, will go through all of these extra steps to secure their information.
Under
quarantine, media is actually social
