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Clubhouse CEO says user data was not leaked, contrary to reports

Clubhouse CEO says user data was not leaked, contrary to reports

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Paul Davison said a report of a breach was “false”

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Clubhouse App Photo Illustrations
Photo Illustration by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Clubhouse CEO Paul Davison said Sunday that a report claiming personal user data had been leaked was “false.” Cyber News reported a SQL database with users’ IDs, names, usernames, Twitter and Instagram handles and follower counts were posted to an online hacker forum. According to Cyber News, it did not appear that sensitive user information such as credit card numbers were among the leaked info.

Clubhouse did not immediately reply to a request for more information from The Verge on Sunday. But Davison said in response to a question during a town hall that the platform had not suffered a data breach. “No, This is misleading and false, it is 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.’”

Last week, Cyber News reported that personal data for 500 million LinkedIn users had been scraped and posted online. The Microsoft-owned company said that no private member account data from LinkedIn was included in the leak.

That news came just a couple of days after it was discovered that personal data for some 533 million Facebook users was leaked online for free. The Facebook leak reportedly included users’ phone numbers, birthdates, locations, email addresses, and full names.

Clubhouse had a monster first year—despite being invite-only and available only on iOS devices— seeing more than 10 million downloads. Twitter, LinkedInDiscordSpotify, and Slack have all launched or are working on competing social audio platforms, and  Facebook reportedly has one in the works as well.

Update April 11th 1:07PM ET: Adds comment from Clubhouse CEO Paul Davison who said the platform was not hacked.