Whistleblowers Beware: Apps Like Whisper and Secret Will Rat You Out
Anonymously spilling personal gossip and corporate secrets online is all fun and games–until someone gets a subpoena.
Startups like Secret and Whisper have defined a buzzy new category of social media, attracting millions of users and tens of millions of dollars in venture capital investments with the promise of allowing anyone to communicate with anonymity. But when it comes to actually revealing corporate and government secrets–a “whistleblowing” function that the two services either implicitly or explicitly condone–users should read the fine print.
For all their vaunted anonymity, both companies collect enough information to easily identify their secret-sharers, and both have exceptions written into their terms of service that allow them to rat out their private users at the first whiff of legal controversy.
