More than a million Clubhouse users had their account info leaked online

Large-scale data leaks have become almost a rite of passage for new social networks. If Clubhouse wasn’t part of the, erm, club before, it is now.

Cyber News reported over the weekend that personal data for around 1.3 million users was scraped from the trendy voice chatroom app and posted on a hacker forum. The compromised data included names, handles for other linked social media accounts, and the username of whoever invited said user, as Clubhouse is still in an invite-only stage.

Clubhouse didn’t immediately respond to Mashable’s request for comment, but the official Clubhouse Twitter account pushed back against the idea that there was a hack, saying the leaked information is already public via the app’s API.

That may technically be accurate, but the end result is still that the data is now available in a collected and searchable format when it wasn’t before. It also begs the question of why all of that information is included in Clubhouse’s API. Things like real names and the user IDs of those who invited them to the app could be considered important enough to keep behind some kind of digital lock.

That also doesn’t preclude the possibility of another, more disastrous leak later on down the line. Clubhouse hasn’t seen a Cambridge Analytica-level catastrophe yet in its short life, but a couple of security concerns have made headlines in 2021 already. Simply releasing a list of people’s real names could, for example, lead to phishing schemes or other nefarious online deeds outside of Clubhouse itself.

Regardless of the actual level of danger associated with this particular data leak, it’ll be worth watching Clubhouse’s handling of data security going forward. If this sort of thing can hit Facebook or Twitter, it feels like it’s only a matter of time for most other social networks.