Koo not leaking data, says co-founder; French hacker disagrees

As made-in-India Koo shot to overnight fame riding on Centre's displeasure with Twitter, the app was accused of leaking data which the founders of the app denied. But the controversy has not been put to rest yet.

Here is all you need to know

> French hacker who goes by the name Elliot Alderson on Twitter, who at one point of time accused Aadhaar of leaking data, levelled the allegation against Koo.

> The hackers said he spent 30 minutes on the app and found that the application is leaking email id, date of birth, name, marital status, gender etc of users.

You asked so I did it. I spent 30 min on this new Koo app. The app is leaking of the personal data of his users: email, dob, name, marital status, gender, ... https://t.co/87Et18MrOg pic.twitter.com/qzrXeFBW0L

— Elliot Alderson (@fs0c131y) February 10, 2021

Some news about data leaking being spoken about unnecessarily. Please read this:

The data visible is something that the user has voluntarily shown on their profile of Koo. It cannot be termed a data leak. If you visit a user profile you can see it anyway

— Aprameya R (@aprameya) February 11, 2021

@aprameya the screenshots of the 1st tweet has been done on this profile. Where do you see her dob? Her gender? Her marital status? pic.twitter.com/RCkTfJU1Vw

— Elliot Alderson (@fs0c131y) February 11, 2021

> One of the co-founders Aprameya Radhakrishnan on Thursday said that the controversy over data leak was unnecessary as those data are what the user has voluntarily provided.

> When a user sets up a profile on Koo, information like name, handle, profession, bio, website, email, mobile, date of birth, gender, marital status, qualification, work experience etc. Providing this information is voluntary as only valid mobile phone number is required for creating an account.

Data Koo seeks from a user while setting up the profile

> Aprameya clarified that the data that was claimed to have been leaked was actually the data that a user "has voluntarily shown on their profile". "It cannot be termed a data leak. If you visit a user profile you can see it anyway," he said.

> Alderson claimed that he checked the point before levelling the allegation and it was not true.

> To sharpen his allegation against Koo, the hacker even shared the profile page of IAS officer Sonal Goel and claimed that he could access more data than what was displayed on Sonal Goel's profile page.

> To this, Aprameya asked the hacker to contact him if he wants to help Koo in its journey to "do something for our country".

> Aprameya also ensured that e-mail ids have been blocked from view.

> All this happened on Twitter while a fake account of Koo on Twitter (@KooAppOfficial) also got suspended. @Kooindia is the official Twitter handle.