A report from Inc's Jason Aten raises there are significant privacy concerns citing Clubhouse policies that are available to the public. For starters, Clubhouse records conversations. One of the app's biggest highlights is having a room full of speakers and an audience who want to discuss some topics and the exchange being on the platform for a brief period and never being available again as a recording.
The audio app says that the recordings are temporary and done for supporting incident investigations. Here's what Clubhouse policy states, "Solely for the purpose of supporting incident investigations, we temporarily record the audio in a room while the room is live. If a user reports a Trust and Safety violation while the room is active, we retain the audio for the purposes of investigating the incident, and then delete it when the investigation is complete. If no incident is reported in a room, we delete the temporary audio recording when the room ends. Audio from (i) muted speakers and (ii) audience members is never captured, and all temporary audio recordings are encrypted."
The policy doesn't mention a timeline for the conversation recording available internally or who all can access such recordings.
Clubhouse also saves some personal data collected from third parties or publicly available sources. This means that despite one never joining Clubhouse, if one of their contacts is on the platform and has already shared the contacts list, then chances are that the platform has stored his number and other available details through third-party sources like Twitter.
The Clubhouse tracks users within the app. Now, the app currently isn't doing much on the monetise front, which means that this could be something that's more applicable for the future. The policy says, "we may share Identification Data and Internet Activity Data with social media platforms and other advertising partners that will use that information to serve you targeted advertisements on social media platforms and other third party websites under certain regulations such sharing may be considered a "sale" of Personal Data."
