Koo, an alternative to Twitter founded by Indians, has hit the news headlines for some reasons. First it has been found by Mayank Bidawataka and Aprameya Radhakrishna as a competition to the world’s second largest social media platform, i.e. Twitter. And from the past two weeks the app has won extreme craze among the young population as it has reached the milestone of 3 million users from just 1.5 million active users a month ago.
All thanks to the marketing team of the Koo app that has roped in political celebrities like Ravi Shankar Prasad and Bollywood stalwarts like Akshay Kumar.
Now, the reason the Koo App has reached the headlines on Cybersecurity Insiders is because it has a Chinese company connection that is raising data privacy concerns among its users.
Shunwei, a subsidiary of Xiaomi, is reported to have made an investment in the app in November 2020. However, one of the Koo’s Co-founder stated that the investment will be returned soon, making the Indian social media platform a complete Indian entity.
The other reason that is making Koo users nervous is that on Wednesday, French security research Robert Baptiste, aka Elliot Anderson on Twitter stated the app is filled with vulnerabilities that can allow hackers to access personal data related to users such as email, date of birth, martial status, gender and other such things.
Well, as of now, there is no evidence that the app’s vulnerabilities have been exploited by hackers. But Aprameya Radhakrishna, the founder of Koo, stated the app is 100% safe regarding privacy.
Earlier in 2020, Robert Baptiste was the person who announced to the world about the loopholes on the servers storing Aadhaar based data. And the Indian media well highlighted his discovery, prompting the Indian government officials to release a press statement regarding the privacy practices followed in recording and storing the details of UID users.
