Based on your own comments here, it sounds like the reporting is entirely accurate. You're attempting to justify why you're tracking your users, but you're still tracking them.
You've highlighted many of the hard problems in this space: how do you achieve anonymity and unlinkability while doing things like IP hiding, spam filtering, and relevance matching? The issue is that you haven't solved the problems, and are instead suggesting you should get a pass because the problems are hard. It seems simple to me: if you haven't designed something that gives you truly unlinkable anonymity, don't claim to provide it. If you have to track your users to make your app work, don't claim not to track your users.
There are projects like Tor that are approaching these types of problems seriously, but apps like Whisper or Secret end up poisoning the well and confusing users. 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.
Nothing I like more than watching you destroy snake-oil companies endangering user privacy, like this one and also Telegraph etc. Let's hope TextSecure/Redphone/Signal when they merge into one brand will get the amount of users they really deserve. This stuff is never just about gossip in Washington DC, it's always about the bigger picture of people in Sudan, China, Russia etc who are led into a false sense of security.
Man, I would love to see some of the pushers of this snake oil software crap in court some day as a result of the dangers they often knowingly expose their users to.
BTW - I've been meaning to drop you a secure mail about some other stuff but will do it next week.
Do you have any links about Telegraph endangering user privacy? I had a friend try to get me to start using it. I haven't really had time yet to do a lot of research on it and would love some insight if they are fishy at all.
100% of network services "track" their users' IP addresses. Every website that is accessible outside of Tor can see its users' IPs. That is the nature of TCP/IP.
You act like this is a deliberate violation of privacy. I don't know what to say, except that you're wrong.
If you ask a question, you consent to be "tracked" to the extent necessary to deliver an answer to you. On the internet, that means IP address.
I don't know what to say, except that you're right. This is the problem that Tor is trying to solve, which is why Tor gets to claim that it is "anonymous," and random websites or apps don't get to make that claim.
I don't think it's a deliberate violation of privacy to operate a website, but I do think that it's a violation to operate a normal website and call it "anonymous." Because, as you point out, it's not.
Not only does it confuse users in the immediate sense, but it poisons the well for everyone who is approaching the problems seriously in the long term.
It's "anonymous" if it doesn't publish your name/identifier alongside your content. 4chan is anonymous. When you use it, you are anonymous to the people reading your comments.
Does this app pretend at any point that its operators couldn't identify users if they wanted to? That would be dishonest. But what word do you expect them to use for "your name will not be published" besides "anonymous"?
This is a useless definition of "anonymous". It's anonymous to the extent that you care about 4chan, but not anonymous to the extent that you care about prosecution.
Where on Whisper's site do they say "this site is anonymous, but it is not safe enough to publish anything with legal implications"? I looked.
I think they essentially do, which is part of @moxie's point about can't vs won't. Above the CTO says "I can't tell you who a user is without them posting their actual personal information", which is very misleading to the general public without the addendum: "...unless I try to".
You've highlighted many of the hard problems in this space: how do you achieve anonymity and unlinkability while doing things like IP hiding, spam filtering, and relevance matching? The issue is that you haven't solved the problems, and are instead suggesting you should get a pass because the problems are hard. It seems simple to me: if you haven't designed something that gives you truly unlinkable anonymity, don't claim to provide it. If you have to track your users to make your app work, don't claim not to track your users.
There are projects like Tor that are approaching these types of problems seriously, but apps like Whisper or Secret end up poisoning the well and confusing users. 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.