Saying What You Mean

It’s been a bad month for marketing claims. Red Bull have agreed to pay $13 million to settle a lawsuit and “avoid the cost and distraction of litigation”. Apparently, while drinking Red Bull might make you feel like you’re flying it doesn’t actually give you wings. Privacy provider Whisper advertised itself as “a safe place for our users to anonymously share their innermost thoughts, secrets, and feelings”. Despite claiming that it doesn’t track IP addresses or geolocation data, it’s alleged that Whisper actually tracks both…and…wait for it…shares it with the US Department of Defence. So your ‘innermost thoughts’ shared with your date from the Russian consulate are sure to be private. As long as you re-define the word private to include half a million contractors across five countries. Much of the controversy isn’t over the fact that internet communications will always be to attributable to some extent, it’s that Whisper claimed otherwise and in doing so appears to have misrepresented their product. Just like the Snowden revelations, we’re again squabbling over the meaning of words like identity, content and