Secret-sharing app Whisper left the DB open to everyone for an unknown time

Marketing and reality are two different things, unfortunately.

Whisper positions itself as a service for sharing secrets anonymously. Lol. I remember when they peaked in my place it was a shitshow of stories about employers who grab women in office, confessions in murders, and other nasty stuff like eating worms with soil when the author was bored during holidays.

As usual, anonymity is just a fancy word for them. I personally can ignore the fact that their privacy policy allows them to pass any data to governments, it's understandable. But it turned out they had their database open out in the wild — supposedly, for years. No password required.

Researchers had access to every single thing. Tip for those who avoided this app: all the messages with its geolocation out in the open. Also, they got access to all users' profiles: age, gender, city, participation in groups, including quite sensitive ones.

Let me paint you a picture: you're one of the 1.5M kids below 15 y.o. who signed up in this app; you believed the "anonymity" feature, so you decided to spit out your real issues and problems, seeking help; you might even decide to join a group related to your sexual orientation — you don't get much help from parents, teachers or peers. Then this huge exploit is found, but not by some researchers, but a prankster (you didn't need a lot of skills to connect to this DB, according to WP), who just pushes it all into the public. With names, ages, geolocation (like school's cantina or home addresses).

Mmm, I feel this glorious and unforgettable taste of privacy on my lips.