There has been no data breach, says Clubhouse

New Delhi: As the news of data breach surfaced online revealing that millions of phone numbers of Clubhouse users are ‘up for sale’ on Dark Web, the chat app maker on Sunday informed that there has been no data breach.

The company also said that it continues to invest in industry-leading security practices as privacy and security are of the utmost importance to Clubhouse.

“There are a series of bots generating billions of random phone numbers,” the company’s spokesperson told IANS.

“In the event that one of these random numbers happens to exist on our platform due to mathematical coincidence, Clubhouse’s API returns no user identifiable information,” it added.

On Saturday, leading cyber-security expert Jiten Jain wrote on Twitter that a database of phone numbers of Clubhouse users is up for sale on the Darknet.

“It also contains numbers of people in user’s phonebooks that were synced. So chances are high that you are listed even if you haven’t had a Clubhouse login,” he wrote.

However, according to independent security researcher Rajshekhar Rajaharia, the data leak claim appears fake as the alleged Clubhouse data contains only mobile numbers without names.

“No names, photos or any other details are available. This list of phone numbers can be generated very easily. The data leak claim appears fake,” Rajaharia told IANS.

In February this year, researchers at Stanford University in the US had warned that the app may be leaking users’ audio data to the Chinese government.

The Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) had claimed that Agora, a Shanghai-based provider of real-time engagement software, supplies back-end infrastructure to the Clubhouse app.

The company has now removed its waitlist system so that anyone can join the platform in a hassle-free manner.

The company also said that it has added 10 million people to the community since its launch on Android in mid-May.