Josh Wieder

Big drama today re: the popular messaging app Whisper. Whisper markets itself as anonymous, calling itself “the safest place on the internet”. But The Guardian disagrees. This morning the influential British newspaper published a story alleging that whisper tracks the geographic location of users who have requested that such tracking be disabled - even more alarming, the Guardian claims that Whisper provides location data to the US Department of Defense about Whisper messages sent from military bases, ostensibly to identify whistleblowers. The Guardian also stated that Whisper sends user data to the FBI and MI5. Whisper's terms of service changed after they found out that the Guardian was moving to publish. Now their TOS explicitly allows user tracking regardless of settings. Neetzan Zimmerman , speaking for the Whisper corporate office, has responded with a series of online pronouncements that were full of sound and fury; calling the story a "pack of lies" that w...

As more of day to day life and communications takes place on IP based networks, and as the regulation  surrounding that convergence removes barriers to owners of those networks providing information gleaned from those communications to third parties (including the State) without fear of tort or criminal  reprisal, it becomes more and more clear that tomorrow's world is one with much less privacy than that envisioned during, say, the writing of the Federalist Papers. The New York Times just published a discussion on the topic that is worth perusing (even if you are not particularly a fan of the Times).