Clubhouse, an American voice social platform that has become increasingly popular with Chinese people because of its high degree of privacy, had its 1.3 million users’ data uploaded to a hacker discussion forum recently and was suspected of being hacked, but the company’s chief executive denied that the data was public. A technology expert said that the above-mentioned by transcribing the user’s own public data and then resold for profit has also been seen in social media such as Facebook recently, calling on Internet users to fill in the public data must be carefully considered, and more worried about the government will take advantage of the situation to strengthen regulation and promote the real name system to facilitate the regime to monitor people.
U.S. cyber security news site Cyber News recently reported that Clubhouse has 1.3 million users’ names, screen names, Twitter (Twitter) or Instagram photo URLs, the number of followers, the number of users following and account creation date and other data was uploaded to a hacker discussion forum, suspected of being hacked. However, sensitive data such as users’ credit card numbers were not included in the data. The company did not confirm at the time whether any user data had been leaked.
The Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data in Hong Kong is also concerned about the incident, saying that the Office is contacting Clubhouse to find out whether the people affected by the incident involve Hong Kong users and their personal data, and has reminded the company that once it is found that Hong Kong users are affected, it should notify the affected users as soon as possible in order to reduce the risk arising from the incident. The PCPD also reminded users to change their accounts or passwords.
However, another U.S. website The Verge published a report in Hong Kong time this morning (12), said Clubhouse CEO Paul Davison (Paul Davison) on Sunday at a community hall party in response, said that the user data leakage is wrong, there is no such thing, the report has the suspicion of misleading, purely to attract attention, the company was not hacked. He explained that the information mentioned in the report is actually the public information of Clubhouse software.
Experts: Internet users are careful to control how much data is disclosed to strengthen the regulation of the advantages and disadvantages of each
Technology experts who do not want to be named said to this station, recently Facebook, LinkedIn and Clubhouse seem to have a similar situation, is to write software engineers to show the public data of the account on the platform, placed in the account of “About” (About), was transcribed by people who want to sell It is easy for users to mistake it for data leakage. He believes that both the user and the platform company are responsible, the former should not think that the public information will only let the specified people see, since it is public, that is, all people can browse, but also the risk of being copied; while the company is not clearly considered whether the relevant data of all users should be public, to facilitate the copying of data, and did not explain clearly to the user the risks of public data. But he added that not all transcribers are ill-intentioned or used for profit, for example, often for small shareholders to speak out and reveal the company’s problems David Webb, whose database is also a transcription of public data, although the Hong Kong government is dissatisfied, but Hong Kong people do not feel that there is a problem, so ultimately did not take action.
He continued to say that the Clubhouse users were disclosed data as an example, whether sensitive, is really a matter of opinion, in fact, many users themselves did not hide the relevant data, and even willing to share with others.
He also said that although some people said that the use of pseudonyms to open an account can avoid the problem of personal data “leaks”, but this is not conducive to friends in the virtual world to identify, but also certainly do not want to be noticed by well-known figures or public opinion leaders welcome.
He estimated that to solve the problem, the government will tend to control the platform, for example, the Hong Kong government will block the data in the name of protection, another possibility is more reason to require social media platforms to implement the real name system, but he pointed out that although the real name system can help solve the problem of fake news, but on the other hand, it helps the authoritarian state to control the people, China is an example, the public must consider carefully, not to be used by the authorities. In the meantime, after weighing the pros and cons, platform users should carefully consider disclosing those data.
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