Clubhouse Is Announcing The Security Improvement After China’s Block

Wire

Clubhouse Is Announcing The Security Improvement After China’s Block

In case you were missing what was happening in the world of social media last week, there is an app which gained much recognition last week by the name of Clubhouse.

In short, Clubhouse is an app where you can engage with people of same interest and have a healthy conversation through audio. The app has also been joined by a few tech entrepreneur giants like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.

However, just like any other app, there will be always that one party which will be unhappy about it. In a short way to describe it, the app has recently been blocked in China. However, the officials from Clubhouse have acknowledged that conversations relating to the China nationals that took place before then could go through Chinese servers.

Based on a statement to the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), Clubhouse admitted that the pings that the company sent to servers all over the world do contain user’s ID. Regardless it applies to a small portion of the traffic, the servers might be located in China too.

This will increase the encryption and blocks within the Clubhouse app to stop it from pinging Chinese servers. A plan has also made by the company to have these changes to be audited and verified by an external security company.

Before the event arose, the SIO researchers raised concerns that Agora, who provides back-end infrastructure to Clubhouse, might have access to users’ raw audio. SIO assumed that as Agora is obey to China’s cybersecurity laws, the company need to turn the recordings over to Beijing if requested to do so under national security grounds.

According to The Verge, Agora does not have access to identifiable user data. The company also insists that voice and video traffic from non-China users does not go through China.

The app got blocked last week after taboo topics like China-Taiwan issue, Uyghur and 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown been discussed.

After all, free speech is something easy to apply but the consequences can be very bad for a country. Not only subjected to the government, even among the citizens itself, it could bring lots of repercussions. Just use the medium wisely and we can have all the nice things.