Yik Yak can share user information with police

Yik Yak users may not be as protected by anonymity as they think. According to a new story from the Associated Press, police officials may now request user information from the popular social network and receive a swift response.

Yik Yak is a social media platform that displays anonymous messages within a certain radius of a location posted by users without identification other than some initials or a generic icon. Because of its location based nature, the app has been widely adopted on college campuses, where some students have used the anonymity of the platform to post racial slurs, comments bordering sexual harassment and even threats of gun violence and bomb placements.

When the Yik Yak controversy entered the national spotlight last year, school officials and police authorities reported that it was difficult to track down the writers of the threats because “there is no way to trace their source.”

This problematic feature of the social network led to a number of college campuses and high schools prohibiting access to the app from their wireless networks. Oklahoma Christian University campus administration announced the university would join that number and block Yik Yak from the campus’s Wi-Fi services following a Talon opinion article that highlighted the moral offenses of many Yik Yak users.

However, these preventative measures did not resolve the nation-wide issue authorities faced in locating authors of suspected threatening posts.

Yik Yak’s new user agreement now includes a clause that allows the app to release a user’s Internet Protocol address to police in cases of public safety and criminal activity. Yik Yak spokesperson Hilary McQuaide told the AP that police “must generally provide a subpoena, court order or search warrant to obtain information about its users, but in an emergency the company may provide details without those legal instruments.”

The new policy has allowed authorities to respond to Yik Yak threats of violence much faster than they were able to previously. Identifying an offender’s IP address and tracking the suspect down, which once took days, can now be done in as little as a few hours with Yik Yak’s help.

With Yik Yak’s new requirements for users to verify their accounts with a phone number, police are able to access information about the device used to write the post and the timestamp of its publication.

Authorities want the increase of required personal information to create more accountability and encourage higher social network responsibility.

Justin Patchin, co-director of the Cyberbullying Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire told CNN the key to solving this problem in the long run is teaching younger generations “how to treat each other respectfully.”

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