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Paul Davidson, the chief executive of the panel-discussion app Clubhouse, has denied that the company was hacked following reports that user data was circulating online.
Instead, Mr Davidson suggested that the data trove – covering the names and other information of 1.3 million users – was cobbled together from public sources.
It follows Facebook confirming the authenticity of another trove of scraped data – this time including phone numbers, and belonging to 500 million users – after reports that it was being leaked online.
People can now search the independent and widely respected Have I Been Pwned? site – which monitors hacking forums for dumps – to see if their numbers are among those listed in the enormous dataset.
During a townhall meeting, Mr Davidson responded to the reports about Clubhouse by stating: “No. This is misleading and false. It’s a clickbait article, we were not hacked.
“The data referred to was all public profile information from our app. So the answer to that is a definitive no,” Mr Davidson added.
However, the company could still face enquiries from privacy regulators, especially in the EU and UK, where data protection laws oblige social media companies to protect user data from being scraped.
Clubhouse has grown significantly this year, partially buoyed by the exclusivity of its invite-only membership process and that the app is only available on iPhones.
The social media platform is audio-only, allowing users to create rooms where a panel of speakers discuss whatever topic takes their fancy while others listen.
