Whisper was an app and website that was, essentially, a form of anonymous (or as anonymous as you can be in this day and age) social media. Launched in 2012, it had about 17,000,000,000 (yep, that’s 17 billion) pageviews by 2017, with about 250 million monthly users in 187 countries. However by 2019, with multiple other “anonymous” forums out there, its popularity was waning.
How did Whisper work? As per Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic:
Anyone can post an anonymous message to the service in the form of an image macro: text overlaid on a picture. When you open the app, you see six such images. Each one has a “secret” on it. You can respond to a message publicly or privately, choosing a public anonymous post or a private pseudonymous chat. Users don’t have a public identity in the app. While they do have persistent handles, there’s no way to contact them except *through* the messages they post.
Welp, some of the people who posted on Whisper were hotel employees, and what they had to say may be in the past, but their warnings are still relevant today. They might be things you want to keep in mind the next time you stay at a hotel…
And now….I think I want to go take a shower.
The Whisper app had allegations of privacy issues for years, although at least some were retracted in the months and years following. Beginning in 2022, the Whisper app began experiencing problems of unknown origin and was removed and reinstated by both Apple’s and Google’s app stores several times before being removed permanently in January, 2025.
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