#What is whisper app android#
It was recently used by a child predator to contact and rape a 12-year-old girl in Pasco County, Florida.ĭescription: Whisper is available on iOS and Android mobile devices, free of charge. Whisper has a total of 17 billion monthly page views on its mobile and desktop websites with 250 million monthly users, mostly teens, across 187 countries. Publishers are becoming increasingly dependent on platforms for distribution and news-gathering, causing some publisher to forge close relationships with certain platforms ( namely Facebook).Īnd yet those publishers also find themselves having to adversarially cover those same platforms.Whisper app is a phenomenally popular app with teens. The entire ordeal is emblematic of the complex relationship between publisher and platforms in modern media. The Guardian did not return a request for comment at time of press. The Guardian, meanwhile, has found itself reporting on a platform it has relied upon for story fodder Whisper helped The Guardian with pieces on Valentine’s Day, illegal immigration and American troops fighting ISIS. Anonymity is central to the platform’s brand, and having a close relationship with the government, no matter how well-intentioned, subverts that. Whisper said in the response that aspects of the Guardian story were untrue, but it did confirm that it has complied with law enforcement requests for data and that it maintains a close relationship with the Department of Defense and other military organizations in order “to lower suicide rates.”įor Whisper, the story and subsequent reaction is a public relations problem. Neither did Whisper’s response to The Guardian story (posted Thursday afternoon on Scribd and embedded below): While Zimmerman’s tweets stressed that Whisper does not collect “personally identifiable information (name, phone, email, address),” he did acknowledge that the platform tracks some users’ locations within a 500 meter radius, and did not refute claims that the platform works with government agencies from the U.S. Zimmerman took to Twitter to defend Whisper and its commitment to its users’ privacy.ġ6/Both the CEO and the Executive Editor openly exclaimed their support for Whisper and, specifically, the newsgathering work it is doing. These partnerships have largely been the work for Neetzan Zimmerman, the platform’s editor-in-chief and former Gawker wunderkind who was hired in January. Valleywag writer Sam Biddle did not respond to an email asking about his interactions with Whisper. In June, Whisper coordinated an interview between one of its users, a man who claimed to be an Uber driver, and Valleywag, Gawker’s tech startup vertical. The BuzzFeed-Whisper partnership entailed Whisper curating “whispers,” its term for anonymously posted messages, around a certain topic to then be used as a BuzzFeed story, such as this video about virgins attending college. But the paper first became aware of Whisper’s questionable practices more recently when two reporters visited Whisper’s offices “to explore the possibility of an expanded journalistic relationship with Whisper,” according to the article. The Guardian has worked with the app since February.
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What makes Thursday’s Guardian story unique is that it was the result of a working relationship between the paper and Whisper, which itself has expressed aspirations to become a viable news source. But as this instance and Snapchat’s several privacy breaches have shown, privacy is never certain on the Web.
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Whisper is one of a host of so-called anonymity and private messaging apps such as Secret and Snapchat, respectively, that have gained popularity by offering an alternative to the inherently public sharing on Facebook.