But the feeling of sharing a painful experience or memory with someone without worrying about its aftermath is indeed golden. And things feel a lot more comfortable and safer if the listener neither knows you nor you know them.
Whisper is one of that app which allowed you to get intimate with an unknown person. Whisper made two anonymous people or groups of people talk to each other in disguise. It made people to share their darkest memories which they want to unload off their chest or share their wildest sexual encounter that they could never share with anyone they know.
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Sounds fun and interesting, right? Of course it is, but now a new report has revealed that all personal data of users could be easily accessed by people online. Whisper is nearly a decade-old app and it has made the personal data of users publicly available as an online database.
However, an America-based media house first brought it into light which ridiculed the fact that app isn't much popular as it was when launched, it observes 30 million active users every month. The app was able to get into the database (before everything blew up and Whisper took them down) and was able to find around 1.3 million entries for the age group of 15 years.
Fortunately, this database didn't really reveal the real names of the users (as Whisper allowed users to be anonymous), it included information like age, location, ethnicity, residence, in-app nickname, and membership in any of the app groups.
But the worst thing is that the data didn’t just include currently active users but also people who have used the app in the past.
According to Mathew Porter and Dan Ehrlich from firm Twelve Security, the database comprised of nearly 900 million user records -- starting from the very first day of the app release. They are the ones who notified the media house, as well as to the federal law enforcement.
On the other hand, the company behind Whisper--Medialab feels that the information was meant to be available to the public and in fact, was a feature provided by the users of the app. Moreover, they defend location sharing as a way to add authenticity to a user.