Clubhouse is fundamentally a public broadcast system. A bit of Twitter, a bit of social podcast. With zero expectation of privacy.
Plus: 12 reasons why Clubhouse is not for lawyers
23 February 2021 (Chania, Crete) – There has been a lot of brouhaha about “Clubhouse” lately – a drop-in audio chat app that’s exactly what it sounds like. Right now, it’s invite only, so it’s not very large. Basically, there are rooms where “speakers” chat, and listeners can raise their hand to participate. Depending on the size of the room and the organization of it, it can feel like watching a conference from the bleacher seats, or just a large coffee house group chatting. I’ve sat in on a number of chats so far and that’s been the audience range.
There are a number of things at work here:
• Clubhouse is a symptom of the hype surrounding it and the FOMO (fear of missing out) associated with it. It the latest shiny new toy to play with, especially if you are going through Zoom fatigue. Rather than concentrating our attention fully and properly to maybe one or two social media platforms we feel the need to be everywhere … at the same time.
• Clubhouse “is a Covid-19 thing”. It launched in April 2020 just after the world went into the first big lockdown. Zoom and Microsoft Teams took off at the same time but people quickly tired of video calls. As Brian Inkster explained “suddenly audio became an alternative (although to be honest it was always there in some shape, form or fashion – e.g. the telephone). Clubhouse became the alternative to the audio experiences we once had. At conferences, at networking events, at the office water cooler and down at the pub or the bar we want to hear voices other than just our partner’s voice, our child’s cry, our dog’s bark, our cat’s meow or for some the daily silence we must endure. People are going onto Clubhouse to satisfy that crave. That is understandable.”
• Social networks are getting competitive again. Facebook itself is finding surprising new challengers in audio, video, photos, and text. Lately, the consumer internet — that set of products devoted to building and monetizing large networks of people — has started to feel rather buzzy. A space that had been largely emptied out over the past five years is once again humming with life. The products are compelling enough, and growing fast enough, that Facebook and others have begun trying to reverse-engineer and copy them: Clubhouse, TikTok, a rising Substack, to name a few. Twitter Spaces will launch soon (it is in Beta) and replicate and improve on Clubhouse. It will immediately enable you to create audio spaces with all your existing contacts rather than having to recreate those contacts (with all the privacy issues that entails) as on Clubhouse. Also you will be able to tweet (text) into the audio Space for that tweet to then be discussed in audio.
• And there are enormous data privacy/security issues when you use Clubhouse which I will address in more detail at the end of this post in the “Postscript”. I’ve also provided links to the Clubhouse “Terms of Service” and “Privacy Statement”. Both laughable. To do a deep-dive into these issues I have turned to Steve King, a key reference point in my “Beyond SolarWinds” cybersecurity series, who has noted “every user’s unique Clubhouse ID number and chatroom ID are transmitted in plaintext and available for eavesdropping”. Over the weekend we discussed how Clubhouse conversations have been hacked and recorded, personal identifiable information scraped, etc. And I also have a link to a brilliant piece by Brian Inkster who notes lawyers should stay well clear of it. All of these privacy concerns exist behind any internet business that eventually will lean on its captured social graph for monetization. We bitch about Facebook doing this but most people have no issue (yet) with Clubhouse.
Before we get to those points, let’s step back a bit.
There is something important going on here, besides the latest social media app. It’s the latest encroachment of oral culture back into the public sphere. And it’s not just because it’s spoken, rather than written. For example Twitter, despite being written, is really dominated by the psychodynamics of oral cultures (“oral psychodynamics” as Zeynep Tufekci calls it; she studies social media and social movements and technology in-depth). As she has written “the oral world is ephemeral, exists only suspended in time, supported primarily through interpersonal connections, survives only on memory, and rather than building final, cumulative works, it is aimed at conversation and remembering knowledge by rendering it memorable, which can often mean snarky, witty, rhythmic and rhyming.”
Think poetry slams rather than essays.
I met Tufekci a few years ago at a TED Talk (she is Turkish, I am of Greek ancestry and our cultural similarities are striking) and we’ve exchanged emails. In an essay she wrote a few years back she explained her use of the phrase:
In oral psychodynamics, the conversational, formulaic styling dominates (which aides memory) as well as back-and-forth, redundancy, an emphasis on being less analytic and more aggregative, being more additive rather than developing complex and subordinate clauses (classic example is the Genesis which, like Homer’s Odyssey, is indeed an oral work which was later written down). Oral pschodynamics also tend to be more antogonistic, interpersonal and participatory. (Wikipedia does a pretty good job of summarizing these arguments but I strongly advise reading Walter Ong’s “Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word” for a more thorough treatment.
And Clubhouse fits into all of this though it is a bit weird. As Ben Thompson has written, to what extent are all of these new companies, particularly those in these new creative spaces, getting pushed versus pulled into existence?
Tesla? Makes complete sense. It was pushed. Electrification of personal vehicles would have happened at some point; General Motors lit the fuse in 1992 when General Motors showed an electric car could be mass-produced – the first in the modern era by a major car manufacturer. But they did not pursue it. It seems fair to argue that Musk accelerated the timeline significantly.
Clubhouse, meanwhile, Silicon Valley’s hottest consumer startup, feels like the opposite case: it was pulled. In retrospect its emergence feels like it was inevitable but if anything, the question is what took so long for audio to follow the same path as text, images, and video.
Clubhouse opens the door to a lot more oral culture by its design, though it easily veers into the podcast model (common form: two speakers/large audience) that is, despite being spoken, is actually written or print culture. And not so coincidentally, Clubhouse in these early days is dominated by the tech crowd (new app, so it will be them) and also disporportionately African-American communities – similar to the way they were disporportionately among Twitter’s early users exactly because it’s one community in the United States that has remained close/closer to oral culture because of its particular historic experience. There’s a long history. To get a background start here.
The most obvious difference between Clubhouse and podcasts is how much dramatically easier it is to both create a conversation and to listen to one. This step change is very much inline with the shift from blogging to Twitter, from website publishing to Instagram, or from YouTube to TikTok. It’s a natural transition.
But Clubhouse might just be a wee bit different in the social media realm. Facebook “friendship” and Twitter “chatter” displaced real rapport and real conversation, just as that Gutenberg’s device displaced remembering.
The things we may be unlearning, Tweet by Tweet – complexity, acuity, patience, wisdom, intimacy – are things that matter in a society and social media technology has done its best to destroy that. Clubhouse just might be able to dial that back a bit.
And I do not want to beat up on Gutenberg and writing and print. But I do want to set a framework so you see how it affects oral tradition. The key to understanding this transition is that while writing did displace the value of memory, the vast abundance of printed material did something else. We changed the shape of our public sphere and also our psychodynamics. We replaced the natural, visceral human “oral psychodynamics” that Tufekci writes about with those of literate and written ones. Most of us are so awash in this new form that we notice it as much as fish notice water. But writing? Really? It is but a blip and the printed but a flash in human history. Orality, on the other hand, is perhaps the most human of our characteristics, and ironically, the comeback of which into the public sphere via Clubhouse is so natural. Yes, with the advent of writing and printing we acquired new cognitive tools and novel psychodynamics. But really, diving into the DNA, we’re still really a “talky” species. That older form of communication never died out. It just receded from importance.
All human societies are also oral cultures. Yes, with big differences. There is a huge body of scholarship that distinguishes the characteristics of oral societies that did not change from those oral societies that became dominated by writing – and Europe and the United States are thoroughly dominated by the written culture even though oral culture is still with us because orality is deeply and intrinsically human. This is true even for deaf communities; the only difference is their orality is visual, not spoken. Primary orality refers to cultures which are untouched by writing whereas residual orality is cultures like ours where writing dominates even our speaking.
NOTE: I could write volumes on this but let me recommend three books that really pulled it all together for me: “How We Became Posthuman” by Katherine Hayles; “Understanding Early Civilizations” by Bruce Trigger; and “African Genesis” by Robert Ardrey.
It is why I call Twitter “oral history”. And it may be tough to get if you’re stuck in an English/Anglo silo. Having lived in the U.S. most of my life, and now in Europe for the past 16 years … in Belgium, France and Greece … and speaking two languages in addition to English, my perspective is different. This distinction is harder to observe in the English Twitter-verse since English is so thoroughly colonized by writing. But Tufekci and I share a common observation (her’s being Turkish). Whenever I dive into Greek Twitter, I notice tweets employing many forms of Greek which are solely found in oral Greek – almost never written down in our literate culture. This distinction is visible in societies where oral culture was not as decisively beaten back as in the English speaking world — and so makes it harder to explain the issue in English. But having spoken with so many non-English speaking friends, in those Twitter communities that are denser, more interconnected networks (they follow one another more readily, they retweet each other more often, and more of their posts are @-replies) oral culture is their root.
But getting back to English … the difference between oral language and written language is also why bad scripts in movies sound so stilted and written transcripts often look so funny. Those bad script writers are stuck in literate English rather than the spoken word. Oral/spoken language is related to but different from written language, and not just in phrases and grammar but also in mood, effect and rhythms.
It’s also why main stream media in the U.S. does so badly, especially news anchors who are actually just products of print culture: they speak in a way nobody speaks. What most TV anchors are doing is simply reading their written voice out loud. That’s print psychodynamics, not orality. It’s why Fox News always does so well, always resonates with its audience, always scores high on audience opinion metrics. Their on-camera personalities speak as their audience speak, as they talk. It is often dismissed and looked down upon because that is partially how power operates in our society. But whatever else it is, it is certainly not illiterate. Just the opposite. It is a deep form of knowledge and culture, just not the written one. Because they report, they talk in that intense emotional vibe or sensationalism that most people do.
It is why Clubhouse is in an underappreciated transition. Because of technology, oral psychodynamics may permit it to break through at scale, and we are trying to (wrongly) understand that solely through a print/written culture.
Because you need to step back and look at the Big Picture, how the grandaddy of independent publishing and print/written culture was transformed by the Internet and our psychodynamics changed: the blog. Suddenly anyone could publish their thoughts to the entire world. I will borrow 3 graphics from Ben Thompson (his blog is called Stratechery) :
• Distributing text no longer required a printing press, but simply blogging software:
• Distributing images no longer required screen-printing, but simply a website:
• Distributing video no longer required a broadcast license, but simply a server:
• Distributing audio no longer required a radio tower, but simply an MP3:
Businesses soon sprang up to make this process easier: Blogger for blogging, Flickr for photo-sharing, YouTube for video, and iTunes for podcasting (although, in a quirk of history, Apple never actually provided centralized hosting for podcasts, only a directory). Now you didn’t even need to have your own website or any particular expertise: simply pick a username and password and you were a publisher.
What is striking about audio is how stunted its development is relative to other mediums. Yes, podcasts are popular, but the infrastructure and business model surrounding podcasts is stuck somewhere in the mid-2000’s. The most obvious difference between Clubhouse and podcasts is how much dramatically easier it is to both create a conversation and to listen to one. This step change is very much inline with the shift from blogging to Twitter, from website publishing to Instagram, or from YouTube to TikTok. And, soon, Twitter Spaces which I noted above – literally a genetic jump in its own right.
I’ll stop there. More to come later this year when I finish a short monograph on internet publishing.
Based on a quick and hardly “meeting-the-rigors-of-science” poll, only 3 people out of 20 I asked have taken the time to read the Clubhouse Privacy Policy or the Clubhouse Terms of Service (links courtesy of Brian Inkster). And one of those 3 is working on the GDPR complaint against Clubhouse in Germany.
I have noted a few of the most egregious clauses below. But the one that is hitting everybody concerns “invites”. If you do not open your contacts/address book to Clubhouse, you only get two “invites” – invitations you can extend to others to join Clubhouse. But your privacy on Clubhouse depends not just on what you do but also on what those who have your information in their contacts do. It’s a game theory puzzle, or even a Prisoner’s Dilemma situation. It is a privacy disaster. For a good overview, click here.
As I have developed my cybersecurity series “Beyond SolarWinds”, I have relied on Steve King, a certified cybersecurity expert with 20+ years experience in cybersecurity markets as CISO, CEO and CMO. He’s spent 6 years in and out of mainland China negotiating deals so he’s informed of the dynamics first hand, an invaluable source. He will be appearing in other chapters in my series.
Over the last few weeks we have discussed the enormous data privacy/security issues when you use Clubhouse. Steve was the first person to point out to me that “every user’s unique Clubhouse ID number and chatroom ID are transmitted in plaintext and available for eavesdropping” and that Clubhouse relies on a Shanghai-based startup called Agora Inc. to handle much of its back-end operations. While Clubhouse is responsible for its user experience, like adding new friends and finding rooms, the platform relies on the Chinese company to process its data traffic and audio production.
Over the weekend we chatted about a few of the most recent developments. Here is a partial transcript of our conversation:
ME: Steve, so now it appears over the weekend an unidentified user was able to stream Clubhouse audio feeds from multiple rooms into their own third-party website. You told me that Clubhouse has permanently banned that particular user and installed new safeguards to prevent a repeat. But you aren’t convinced.
STEVE: I do not think that platform is in any position to make such promises. It certainly looks like these conversations were hacked and recorded, and personal identifiable information scraped.
ME: Can you run by, in brief, what we are talking about there?
STEVE: Well, I read the Stanford Internet Observatory report which was first to publicly raise security concerns (and that was on the 13th of February) and as I have said before you need to assume all conversations are being recorded. Numerous sources have reported that audio and metadata were being pulled from Clubhouse to at least one another site. I suspect we’ll find out there will be others. If you look at Clubhouse, it is pretty easy for a user to install a system to remotely share his login with the rest of the world. You just build your own system around the JavaScript toolkit used to compile the Clubhouse application. It’s basic jury-rigging the platform.
ME: You also provided a few more details in a Linkedin post this weekend.
STEVE: Well, it’s pretty much what I had noted last week and what you and I have discussed. We already know that Clubhouse is running on a service from Shanghai-based Agora Inc. which also manages its data traffic and audio production – which means the Chinese ministry of defense gets all conversational recordings along with member IDs – and then we discover this weekend that a hacker was also able to stream audio feeds over the weekend from “multiple rooms” into their own third-party website. This is a second and different compromise from the Android GitHub hack which allowed anyone to listen to audio without an invite code, along with free access to various personal sessions. That one was written in simplified Chinese (implying mainland China).
This one bricks an iPhone, reverse-engineers the application and uses a bot to access the streams and then calls the Agora backend as it traverses the room IDs. If the bot gets banned, another iPhone simply replaces it. That $100 million investment they got last month is obviously not being spent on security. I was not joking when I said if you persist on using Clubhouse, why not just mail your passport, passwords and SS card to Xi Jinping directly. I’m sure he’d love to hear from you.
ME: You also noted the Clubhouse Terms and Conditions. Which could make everybody a willing accomplice.
STEVE: As you and I have discussed, I think it is safe to say most people have not read the Clubhouse Terms and Conditions. If they did, they’d see that every time you open the invite tab, clubhouse uploads all the phone numbers from your address book. The upload happens not only the first time the invite tab is accessed, but is repeated every time you open the tab. This means that clubhouse could create a complete history of your contacts from the time you registered with the app and theoretically also knows which people you probably met only recently. So they can profile you. In fact, Clubhouse could create a shadow profile of your contacts.
ME: I like their indemnity clause: “You agree to release, indemnify and hold Alpha Exploration Co. and its affiliates and their officers, employees, directors and agents (collectively, “Indemnitees”) harmless from any from any [sic] and all losses, damages, expenses, including reasonable attorneys’ fees, rights, claims, actions of any kind and injury (including death) arising out of or relating to your use of the Service, any User Content, your connection to the Service, your violation of these Terms of Service or your violation of any rights of another.”
As one of Brian Inkster’s readers noted “so if, for example, you violated someone’s privacy rights by allowing Clubhouse to create a shadow profile of them as part of joining the club that is your fault and not Clubhouse’s fault.”
STEVE: You’d know this better than me, but I suspect lawyers will no doubt be able to come up with many other problems for a Clubhouse member by clawing through the Terms of Service. I haven’t even begun to look at the other clauses.
ME: Lawyers in Germany are already getting ready to sue Clubhouse on the Terms of Service so that will be one to watch.
Lawyers have been flogging it as a great opportunity. Well, lawyers connected to the legal world but not necessarily practicing lawyers. They are lawyers that work in legaltech or entities that promote legal business development. One such lawyer said on their blog “lawyers are also finding business and making money from Clubhouse, too – I know at least three attorneys who reported signing up clients (one found a whopping 15 in a span of two weeks) after hosting Q&As on Clubhouse on topics like business law, branding and trademarks”.
Which all seems to be a breach of the Clubhouse “Terms of Service” which prevents commercial use:
Unless otherwise expressly authorized herein or in the Service, you agree not to display, distribute, license, perform, publish, reproduce, duplicate, copy, create derivative works from, modify, sell, resell, exploit, transfer or upload for any commercial purposes, any portion of the Service, use of the Service, or access to the Service. The Service is for your personal use.
Eh. No worries. The “Terms of Service” will be changing soon. Clubhouse recently announced that:
Over the next few months, we plan to launch our first tests to allow creators to get paid directly—through features like tipping, tickets or subscriptions. We will also be using a portion of the new funding round to roll out a Creator Grant Program to support emerging Clubhouse creators.
So Clubhouse will be turning into a very commercial marketplace sometime soon. They will after all have to make money out of it somehow.
Nobody has done a better job on detailing the pros and the cons of Clubhouse for lawyers than Brian Inkster. He has written an incredibly detailed blog on why he thinks Clubhouse is not for lawyers or indeed not for anyone connected with the legal world. Scores of quotes and links – many of which I already had in preparing this piece so it was nice that like like minds were on the same page.
You can read Brian’s post by clicking here.
And you can watch the video summary by clicking here.