The new social networks often make a stir as soon as they are launched, but the case with the Club House application was different, the application caused a greater sensation than usual, on the positive and negative sides as soon as it appeared in 2020, given a number of factors, the most importantAnd the application of the application on the invitation system, and the presence of many celebrities on it, such as Elon Musk, with an exclusive application of iOS.As for the other side of the large number of talk about the application, it is the emergence of many problems related to safety and privacy in it, and the outbreak of competition between technology giants and communication applications on the one hand, and the Club House platform on the one hand, where companies started building similar applications for Club House or by bringing its features to their applications currently..
ما هو كلوب هاوس؟The Club House application is a social network that relies on voice only, given that it converts group voice calls to audio room.
The establishment of the room can invite other members to be speakers or supervisors, and the room is private or public. If the room is general, anyone can join it using the invitation link or through the exploration page of the application.Once you enter the public room, you can listen calmly for everyone in the room.And when anyone joins the room, he will be listened to by default, and those who wish to discuss can use the feature of raising the hand, and the officials of the room can allow the person to speak and not.But when you want to leave the room or close the application, you can do this without causing any fuss as no notifications appear when someone joins or leaving the room.The application of the application in China due to the absence of censorship
Last February, China suddenly banned the application of Club House without introductions, after the application began to acquire great popularity within it.Since the application was not included in the Chinese application store, it is not possible to identify the number of actual users from China.Club House's application programming interface was also banned later, as well as preventing verification codes from accessing Chinese phone numbers.The reason for the ban is that the audio chat application is not subject to control by the Chinese government. Thus, Klopp House joined the list of long banned social networks, which includes Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
تطبيق ClubhousePrivacy and safety problems
Reports on the privacy of users and their data did not stop issuing specialized organizations and security researchers since the beginning of the application, according to the Stanford Observatory of the Internet, there are some security defects that can be used to reach user conversations and spy them easily, and the hacker has proven the validity of this speech, as he withdrawn the sound fromThe platform and broadcast it on an external party site.
The Club House application uses a background infrastructure for sound processing and data traffic provided by Agoraio, which is located in Shanghai, in China, and therefore the Chinese government can access any data asking the company to provide it with it.
The Stanford Observatory report shows a number of other problems in the application, such as transferring unique users ’identifiers as well as chatting in the form of text files without encryption or blindness, and therefore this information can be obtained through the hacker or the Internet service provider in a network analysis process.
The privacy policy for the Club House application also includes a number of controversial points regarding user data:
1- The application records your voice
The application records the audio as soon as you enter any room automatically, and the user cannot control this matter.The company explains that the purpose of this feature is to keep these records for a temporary period in order to conduct investigations if any violations are reported in the room, and if this does not happen, the recordings are deleted after the chat room is completed.
2- You cannot delete any information that others share around you
When you invite anyone to take the entire list of your contacts and raise them to their servers, and therefore even if you have not created an account, if someone you know has an account, there is a great possibility that Club House has your phone number already has a phone number.Moreover, if a person uses his personal files on social media to register in Club House, he will collect, store and update the information related to the third -party account used periodically, such as the lists of friends or followers, according to the text of the privacy policy..Until now there is no mechanism to delete any personal information about you, whether it is collected through the lists of contacts or through other social networks.
3- There is no choice to delete your account from the platform.
If you have a Club House account, you cannot delete it without sending an email to the support account, the application does not have any choice to delete your account, and there are no instructions about what you need to do if you want to delete the account.Thus, the only solution is available to send an email to "Email Protectored" to request to cancel your account, and wait for a person from the support team to take action.
4- Applying your personal information without your loss
One of the biggest controversial questions about Club House is how the platform intends to make money?.Given the privacy policy, it is clear that the platform will depend on a form of advertising or the care system.To prepare for this, the privacy policy shows that the platform "may share personal data with the current and future subsidiaries".The same section also shows in the privacy policy that Klopp House may participate in categories of the aforementioned personal data without your feeling.This means that you do not have the right to know that your personal information collected by the application is used outside the application.
5- The Club House application follows you
Privacy policy says that the platform uses cookies and tracking techniques to monitor what you do within the Club House application and on the website of the platform, although it does not use any profit currents currently.It also states that the platform may perform the identification data and your activity data with social media platforms and other advertising partners who will use information to target you with their ads on social media platforms and other web sites, and this item can be considered as an explicit "sale" for user dataPersonal.
تطبيق ClubhouseThe beginning of the competitors' struggle
With the increasing popularity of Klopp House, other social networks started working on its own version of the platform or to integrate the platform features with its existing applications..According to the Sensor Tower Data Analysis Company at the application available on iPhone phones only about 3.6 million users around the world (until February 2), thus the opportunity to compete is intense, especially for other operating systems such as Android, which occupies the top of mobile operating systems..- Facebook:
The New York Times published a report last February on the development of audio rooms within its Messenger application.Facebook has a full history of cloning its competitors. In 2016, Instagram copied the feature of the rival Snapchat application.
According to the Alyssandro Paluzzi phone developer in the report, Facebook will allow anyone who has an account on the site to use live audio rooms through the same site without the need to move to the Messenger application.Information such as the title of the room, the number of speakers and the number of listeners will be displayed when joining it without entering the full screen mode.It also seems that some of the features of Club House are coming to Instagram as well..- Twitter:
As for Twitter, it appears to add the finishing touches before entering the competition, as it announced the availability of direct voice chat rooms, known as Twitter Spaces, to Android users experimentally after it was previously cabin on iOS users only since late December 2020.Telegram:
While the competing companies are preparing and testing the combination of the Club House features, the Telegram application jumped to the confrontation immediately after the launch of version 7.6 of the program last March, with which he brought major changes to collective voice conversations.Telejram users on desktop and smartphones can create audio rooms inside Telegram channels, and conversations with an unlimited number of listeners..Listeners can use the hand -up feature to request speaking permission, and audio room owners can record conversations and obtain the audio file for the conversation recorded on Telegram directly, because the registration is done through the cloud services of the application and not the user device.- Slack:
On March 25, the Executive Director of the Slack platform for communication between work teams or employees within the same company stated that the platform will soon provide features adapted from Club House to enable users to enter the voice chat rooms without the need to make a prior scheduling or create a private call.Discod:
The Discord platform for communication has a great popularity between the players' community, and recently during the epidemic period, it started to gain popularity in the field of business as well.And a violation of this opportunity, the platform announced at the end of last March the launch of the platform feature, to be another method of communication available next to the written and audio chat channels..As its name is revealed, the platforms are designed to enable only one person to speak at the same time while other users listen.- LinkedIn:
It seems that Microsoft will not miss the opportunity to compete in the applications of audio rooms as well, according to the developer Alessandro Paluzzi, the analysis of the LinkedIn application file on the phone shows the start of the platform's work on the audio room feature, LinkedIn confirmed this at the end of last March.