I signed the App Maker’s Privacy Pledge. It was easy to do since the first paragraph pretty accurately summarises my thoughts:
We… value a long term relationship with customers who trust us over selling those same customers out to other companies for short term gains.
It says that I pledge:
- To be clear about what information our apps need to provide the features we offer.
- To only collect information required to implement our apps’ features.
- To allow our customers to opt in to only those features they are comfortable with; never to enable features that enable information-sharing without explicit agreement.
- To allow our customers to review the information we have collected about them, and to delete information about a customer when that person requests it.
- To present in clear language our relationships with other businesses, and the information we share as part of that relationship.
This philosophy filters through all Wandle apps. They do exactly what they say they do. They don’t collect personal details (so there’s no need to out-out), they don’t “phone home,” I don’t have any information about you. They don’t even collect anonymous statistics.
I especially like the last paragraph of the pledge:
In short, our apps – not our customers – are our products.
I think this is important. These days Google and Facebook make huge amounts of money by selling your attention to advertisers. That’s not the kind of business I want to be in. I think it’s much fairer to sell something of value. This is why last year I transitioned www.cut from being ad-supported to being 99c and that’s partly why the next major version of Yummy won’t have a free version.
There are lot of companies out there trying to dupe their customers, but I have no intention of being one of them. I’d rather have your trust than make a quick buck at your expense.