Clubhouse, the exclusive, hyped chat app, changes invite procedure

Clubhouse is being less invasive, now allowing users to invite friends directly, instead of sharing their whole contact lists with the company. — dpa

Users generally don’t like it when an app asks you to give it access to your entire address book of contacts. The much-hyped invite-only audio chat app Clubhouse has apparently recognised this and has changed its approach.

Until now, if you wanted to invite someone to Clubhouse (still the only way for new users to sign up), you needed to open up your collection of contacts to the app.

Despite being limited to iOS users with an invitation from someone else on the platform, the app has become one of most hyped in 2021, and is said to count Silicon Valley heavyweights like Mark Zuckerberg and celebrities like Drake and Oprah among its users.

In February, celebrity entrepreneur Elon Musk even invited Russian President Vladimir Putin for a chat on the app, which lets you join audio chat “rooms” where other people are having conversations.

The app brands itself as “a space for casual, drop-in audio conversations-with friends and other interesting people around the world.” Making the app even more exclusive, there’s no Android version of Clubhouse yet, but one is said to be in the works.

Following the latest iOS app update, users no longer need to give the app access to their complete list of contacts to invite a friend onto the platform, as the update’s release notes show.

Instead, you can now simply type in the number of the person to whom you want to send the invitation. Until now, you could still use the app and prohibit the app from viewing your address book, but then you had no way of inviting friends.

Testers at the German consumer watchdog Stiftung Warentest found that the Clubhouse app collects an unnecessarily large amount of data on its users and that its privacy policy violates the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation.

They also suggested that anyone who invites a friend warn them that their contacts may end up with Clubhouse, as owner Alpha Exploration grants itself the right to use collected contact data for marketing and advertising purposes. – dpa