Last month, the Guardian did a hard-hitting piece on Whisper, reporting that the start-up that offered users the cover of anonymity to voice their deepest secrets was actually tracking interesting users, storing user data and making it searchable for editorial and research use by outside organizations (like the Guardian), and "sharing information with the US Department of Defense gleaned from smartphones it knows are used from military bases." Regarding one sex-crazed lobbyist using the app from D.C., an unnamed member of the Whisper team told Guardian reporters that "he’s a guy that we’ll track for the rest of his life and he’ll have no idea we’ll be watching him." Whisper has fought back hard against the damaging report -- which led to terrible press and an angry letter from a senator -- saying the Guardian exaggerated the scrutiny it put its users under, was wrong about its cavalierly digging up location information on users who hadn't volunteered it, and had talked to an employee whose statements "[did] not reflect our values and what we stand for."
What I wanted to know was what exactly Whisper was handing over to the Pentagon. The Guardian described it thusly: "The company is cooperating with the US Department of Defense, sharing information with researchers investigating the frequency of mentions of suicide or self-harm from smartphones that Whisper knows are being used from US military bases." I reached out to both Whisper and to the DoD to find out the exact nature of the information being handed over, and found out it was less alarming -- and less useful -- that it initially seemed.
At first the Pentagon had no idea what I was talking about. Whisper CEO Michael Heyward had said Whisper was working with the Department of Defense's Suicide Prevention Office but Defense Department spokesperson James Brindle said that wasn't the case. "The Defense Suicide Prevention Office is unaware of the use of Whisper as a suicide prevention tool for the Department of Defense," said Brindle.
When I kept digging, I found out instead that it was a DoD researcher doing a multi-year study on suicide in the military. She reached out to Whisper after she saw this Buzzfeed post by now-suspended Whisper editorial director Neetzan Zimmerman about what users posting from military bases have said about PTSD. She asked if Whisper could provide information about military members posting suicidal thoughts, and sent Whisper a list of 12 bases she was interested in. Whisper made a list of terms, including “kill myself,” "depression," and "suicide", and searched for them among posts that users had made and tagged with a location within 5 miles of a military base. Whisper didn't send the posts, instead sending an Excel sheet with two fields: the name of the military base and how often the selected terms appeared in posts at the given base. Visualized and normalized for the number of users around a given base, the data translated to the chart above, provided by Whisper.
The takeaway for a member of the military would be to pray not to be assigned to Fort Hood or Fort Campbell. But the information ended up being useless to the Department of Defense researcher, given that the location range extended beyond a given base and the fact that there was no context for the information: a post with the word "suicide" could reflect a plan to kill oneself or an interest in electronic protopunk.
"We experimented with data, donated by Whisper, for areas surrounding a dozen military installations," says a Defense official. "Without proper context for the posts, and without knowing the poster's association with the military, we could not develop a solid project proposal at this time."
So rather than this revealing an invasion of Whisper users' privacy, the info handover reflects how useless big data analysis can sometimes be and the need to check start-ups' claims about the extent of their partnerships with other entities. While it debunks Whisper's claims about partnering with the DoD Suicide Prevention Office, it does bolsters Whisper's argument that the Guardian's report cast the company in an overly negative light and that its portrayal of Whisper's relationship with the Pentagon in particular was a bit "alarmist."
