Whisper tracks its users. So we tracked down its LA office. This is what happened next

Our man outside HQ of anonymous messaging app

Another interesting thing reported by The Graun, was that Whisper employees scour countless messages posted each day in order to find any that might be newsworthy.

This service is the foundation of a number of "partnerships" that Whisper has with media outlets including BuzzFeed, Fusion and the Huffington Post. It was also why The Guardian was allowed to see the company's inner workings – they were working on a partnership until the reporters got spooked by what they saw.

If you do post something interesting using Whisper, it turns out that you may get a call from a Whisper employee, but they don't want to tell you that at first. You know, in case you get freaked out by the fact that the app was supposed to be anonymous…

I followed it up with posts on Twitter. No response of any type, although others are starting to chime in and ask questions. For a social media company, Whisper really doesn't get this interaction thing…

It suddenly occurs. Maybe Whisper just doesn't like talking face-to-face…

Trying to strike up a conversation with @whisper... pic.twitter.com/WTI4on5nBr

— Kieren McCarthy (@kierenmccarthy) October 17, 2014

Over at Hacker News, security researcher Matthew Rosenfeld aka Moxie Marlinspike is not impressed with Whisper's explanations:

You're attempting to justify why you're tracking your users, but you're still tracking them… you haven't solved the problems, and are instead suggesting you should get a pass because the problems are hard… There's a huge difference between 'can't' track and 'won't' track. Right now you're claiming 'can't,' but it sounds like you're squarely in the 'won't' category of having your servers 'avert their eyes.' I think this understandably makes people uneasy, particularly given the data mining direction it sounds like the company is headed.

So we decided to ask:

Meanwhile, another security researcher and forensics expert for iOS devices, Jonathan Zdziarski, has weighed in. He doesn't like what he finds either: "While they may not have provided their name, the application has generated a unique identifier that can potentially be used to track them throughout the life of the application. When associated with unfiltered or overlapped global positioning data, their identities could be at risk."

Seems like something Whisper would want to address…

And then things start getting a little odd. The Whisper app says that it is having trouble posting my images created through its own app. With more than two million posts going up each day, we're told, it seems like an extraordinary coincidence that mine have stopped appearing.

Is the company that tracks its users when it says it doesn't, and creates a unique ID for each user despite claiming that it never stores any identifiable information, showing its true nature?