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from the here-we-have-a-boring-public-IRC dept.
After bans from Apple and Google, Sarahah debuts Enoff, an iOS app for anonymous feedback at work
Sarahah, the anonymous messaging app founded in Saudi Arabia that became an unexpected viral sensation with teens, clocking up over 300 million registered users before getting banned by Apple and Google over bullying, is making a return to the App Store — but not as you might think.
The startup has launched a new, free iOS app called Enoff (pronounced "enough") aimed at organizations, tapping into the wave of employee activism and speaking out about unfair practices to provide a way for people in a team to give anonymous, one-way feedback to bosses and human resources reps. An Android version of Enoff is coming "very soon," according to CEO and founder Zain al-Alabdin Tawfiq.
Available also on the web, the aim is to provide a way to give feedback in cases of harassment, corruption and other tricky workplace situations where employees might fear repercussions for speaking out.
Easy way to monetize app: allow bosses to pay to unmask users.
Also at Wired.
Previously: Hit App Sarahah Quietly Uploads Your Address Book
Related: Anonymous Social App Raises Controversy on College Campuses
Square Hires Yik Yak's Engineers, Leaving Fewer Than 10 Employees Behind
Japan's Recruit Holdings Co. Acquires Glassdoor for $1.2 Billion
Related Stories
Jonathon Mahler writes in the NYT that in much the same way that Facebook swept through the dorm rooms of America’s college students a decade ago, the social app Yik Yak, which shows anonymous messages from users within a 1.5-mile radius is now taking college campuses by storm. "Think of it as a virtual community bulletin board — or maybe a virtual bathroom wall at the student union," writes Mahler. "It has become the go-to social feed for college students across the country to commiserate about finals, to find a party or to crack a joke about a rival school." And while much of the chatter is harmless, some of it is not. “Yik Yak is the Wild West of anonymous social apps,” says Danielle Keats Citron. “It is being increasingly used by young people in a really intimidating and destructive way.” Since the app’s introduction a little more than a year ago, Yik Yak has been used to issue threats of mass violence on more than a dozen college campuses, including the University of North Carolina, Michigan State University and Penn State. Racist, homophobic and misogynist “yaks” have generated controversy at many more, among them Clemson, Emory, Colgate and the University of Texas. At Kenyon College, a “yakker” proposed a gang rape at the school’s women’s center.
Colleges are largely powerless to deal with the havoc Yik Yak is wreaking. The app’s privacy policy prevents schools from identifying users without a subpoena, court order or search warrant, or an emergency request from a law-enforcement official with a compelling claim of imminent harm. Esha Bhandari, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, argues that "banning Yik Yak on campuses might be unconstitutional," especially at public universities or private colleges in California where the so-called Leonard Law protects free speech. She said it would be like banning all bulletin boards in a school just because someone posted a racist comment on one of the boards. In one sense, the problem with Yik Yak is a familiar one. Anyone who has browsed the comments of an Internet post is familiar with the sorts of intolerant, impulsive rhetoric that the cover of anonymity tends to invite. But Yik Yak’s particular design can produce especially harmful consequences, its critics say. “It’s a problem with the Internet culture in general, but when you add this hyper-local dimension to it, it takes on a more disturbing dimension,” says Elias Aboujaoude.” “You don’t know where the aggression is coming from, but you know it’s very close to you.”
According to a Monday report in Bloomberg Businessweek, Square has acquired the "five- to ten-person" engineering team of Yik Yak for $3 million. That leaves just a handful of employees at the Atlanta-based social networking startup. In December 2016, the company already fired 30 of its 50 employees.
Since late last year, Yik Yak has largely gone silent. Its Twitter account hasn't posted since January 4, and its corporate blog has not posted since a month before that. According to Bloomberg, Square has not acquired any other companies since it bought the food delivery startup Caviar in 2014. (Square was founded as a mobile payment company in 2009 by Jack Dorsey, who also founded Twitter.)
Sounds like bad news for Yik Yak, good news for Yik Yak's engineers.
Sarahah, a new app that lets people sign up to receive anonymized, candid messages, has been surging in popularity; somewhere north of 18 million people are estimated to have downloaded it from Apple and Google’s online stores, making it the number three most downloaded free software title for iPhones and iPads.
Sarahah bills itself as a way to “receive honest feedback” from friends and employees. But the app is collecting more than feedback messages. When launched for the first time, it immediately harvests and uploads all phone numbers and email addresses in your address book. Although Sarahah does in some cases ask for permission to access contacts, it does not disclose that it uploads such data, nor does it seem to make any functional use of the information. Sarahah did not respond to requests for comment.
"Zachary Julian, a senior security analyst at Bishop Fox, discovered Sarahah's uploading of private information when he installed the app on his Android phone, a Galaxy S5 running Android 5.1.1. The phone was outfitted with monitoring software known as BURP Suite, which intercepts internet traffic entering and leaving the device, allowing the owner to see what data is sent to remote servers. When Julian launched Sarahah on the device, BURP Suite caught the app in the act of uploading his private data.
"As soon as you log into the application, it transmits all of your email and phone contacts stored on the Android operating system," he said. He later verified the same occurs on Apple's iOS, albeit after a prompt to "access contacts," which also appears in newer versions of Android. Julian also noticed that if you haven't used the application in a while, it'll share all of your contacts again. He did some testing on the app on a Friday night, and when he booted the app on a Sunday morning, it pushed all of his contacts again."
Japan's Recruit Buys Jobs Website Glassdoor for $1.2 Billion
Japanese human-resources and consumer-information provider Recruit Holdings Co. has agreed to buy Glassdoor for $1.2 billion in cash. Through the tie-up, Recruit will gain access to the U.S. website's extensive cache of content such as employee reviews, while Glassdoor will seek to accelerate its push into non-U.S. markets. Recruit shares rose as much as 3 percent in Tokyo.
[...] Glassdoor runs the second-largest job website in the U.S. and is known for hosting anonymous employee reviews about the culture and management of their companies. Glassdoor was taking steps earlier this year toward an initial public offering and was said to be interviewing banks for a market debut in 2018.
Also at TechCrunch.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 02 2019, @07:02AM (3 children)
Gee, I hope my employwers at Boston General Dynamics cannot trace my troll posts at soylent news to my actual identity as Joe Smolinki, at the San Diego Plant, who has been called up multiple times for "insentitive" remarks. Godspeed, Ethanol_Fueled, and may you end up in the precise hell you deserve.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 02 2019, @09:06AM (2 children)
No, this is not the Ethanol_Fueled you are looking for, since ethanol is haram in Saudi Arabia, and all good Muslin countries.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 02 2019, @10:28PM
"...ethanol is haram in Saudi Arabia, and all good Muslin countries."
What about wool and polyester countries? Is he Haram there, as well? Just asking.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 03 2019, @05:49AM
There's at least one good one? Name it!
I thought they were all evil. They do worship Satan, so how can they be "good"?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 02 2019, @07:20AM (1 child)
Can we nuke the place now?
(Score: 0, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 02 2019, @09:08AM
Nukes seem a bit extreme, but we could have had a nice aristarchus submission. Maybe.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Saturday February 02 2019, @09:47AM (7 children)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 02 2019, @01:44PM (3 children)
How do you load software onto your mobile computing device?
Encode the program in 1's and 0's directly onto the SD card with a magnet?
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday February 02 2019, @02:32PM (1 child)
well technically you can download an apk for android. Of course getting the apk for the app might be easy or impossible.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Saturday February 02 2019, @03:35PM
I can understand why google felt they had to try it, what I can't understand is why consumers let them do it. Now microsoft is trying the same thing (Windows S) and again, insane as it is, it looks like they'll get away with it.
Mabye people are just too stupid to have computers.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Arik on Saturday February 02 2019, @03:31PM
Well I'd probably run the program through a cross-compiler and produce a blob first, then use the magnets in my reader to encode the 1s and 0s onto the SD card, but yeah, that's roughly how it works.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday February 02 2019, @04:05PM
What's not to your liking with F-Droid [f-droid.org] that isn't addressed in Aptoide [github.com]?
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 02 2019, @05:03PM (1 child)
Agreed. I jailbroke my phone and install APKs manually. Though it is a bit of a challenge to ensure that I get clean versions of apps.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 03 2019, @05:21AM
Fine, but where do you get them from such that you trust the source?
The Nord VPN android app [nordvpn.com] can be downloaded from their Android download page with a link to the apk [onelink.me] through "go.onelink.me" whatever that is..
Is there a database somewhere for apk files? e.g.
* K9 Mail
* Firefox Browser (android)
* AdBlocker browser
* Colornote
* Duckduckgo browser
* Ghostery browser
* Sliepnir
* 3G watchdog
* Ghost commander
Etc etc.
All the apps you'd normally get from the google store.
It's nice that OpenVPN for Android [github.com] is on Github.
Right now after I format I load Google Store with all of the crappy nasty device sucking services that come with it, get the apps that I want, and then disable all of the Google from my device.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 02 2019, @10:38AM (1 child)
Snailmail letters banned! Linked to bullying and blackmail!
How could the postal service have been allowed to operate a service which permits such hareful acts for so long! Stand up and demand we ban snailmail today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 03 2019, @01:06PM
After an exhaustive investigation we have determined that the original offenders used "stamps" to entice the postal service to deliver the items in question. Those bastards!
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 02 2019, @10:44AM (1 child)
--- Wikipedia
This isn't a privacy respecting app, it just wears privacy as marketing. While it's tempting to account good those privacy-flavoured services which attract the ire of censorious fools, their increased aggression to any form of privacy leads them to attack even half-arsed privacy now.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Arik on Saturday February 02 2019, @11:09AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Bot on Saturday February 02 2019, @02:39PM (2 children)
Minihowto: send anonymous threats er.. feedback using a smartphone:
1. find used IP68 hardened phone
2. tie tightly scrap of paper with feedback to phone
3. launch phone through the windows of the target's sleeping quarters
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 03 2019, @12:00AM (1 child)
What if the target's sleeping quarters are running linux or BSD?
(Score: 2) by Bot on Monday February 04 2019, @10:24AM
Then he's a friend and you shouldn't be bothering him/her/it
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday February 02 2019, @09:48PM (1 child)
I had a whole bunch of different nicks at Kuro5hin.
All but just two or three they instantly spotted my writing style.
In other news, snow might come to Vancouver and Portland, see. I Am Absolutely Serious.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 03 2019, @12:39AM
That means you weren't trying hard enough.