The invite-only social media app, which lets people gather in audio-only "rooms" for free-flowing discussions, is in the midst of an explosive growth spurt. With reportedly over 10 million users as of mid-February, the demand for accounts is so high that people are trying to sell them for as much as $100. The real challenge, however, lies in deleting an account — a potentially serious safety concern for users now struggling to do so as they see their professional and personal lives unwillingly mixed.
With full access to your contact list, and with a database matching phone numbers to Clubhouse accounts, the app both prompts you to follow users whose phone numbers are in your phone and "lets you see which of your friends are on Clubhouse" — even if those "friends" don't have clubhouse accounts in their real names.
While valuable from a Silicon Valley-growth perspective, this kind of discoverability can cause serious problems for historically vulnerable populations — for instance, sex workers — who often attempt to keep their work lives separate from their personal lives. As we've seen time and time again, people outed as past or present sex workers have faced harassment, been fired, and been made to deal with other real-world consequences.
As we previously reported, the only way (as of the time of this writing) to delete a Clubhouse account is to email the company with a request. That doesn't mean the company will respond, however. Clubhouse ignored four written account-deletion requests, starting Feb. 11, from this very reporter before responding on Feb. 26.
Even then, the Clubhouse support team didn't delete my account — it asked me to link an email to the account, and provided instructions for doing so in-app that didn't work. As of the time of this writing, my Clubhouse account still remains on the platform.