It now reads: "We may disclose personal information to: third parties, including agents or sub-contractors, who assist us in sending direct marketing about our new products and features"
What I meant about legal expertise is that we don't want to be in violation of our privacy policy if we decide to use tools to understand our users better, or if we decide to email users about new products and features. Which is why I left some room in the privacy policy to enable such features.
This alone will be enough of a deal breaker for privacy nuts, such as myself. If I'm going to use your service, you just champion privacy. This means no marketing gimmicks.
Sorry. For me this comes no way close to being an iMessage alternative. Even if you become a privacy champion, you still need to expect us to trust your servers, which is a tricky thing without end to end encryption.
Maybe an alternate model is to get funding from big corporate sponsorship and have a distributed network that could be hosted on our own droplets (using open source, of course). You can then have a paid hosted saas for those not technically ready to self host. Until there's a solution out there that does just that, I'm very unlikely to bite.
I imagine Thread as a company that focuses more on delivering products that allow people to build more meaningful relationships and connections in a way that benefits their long term mental/social health. I believe we can do that in a way that delivers an 80/20 on privacy too, by not using targeted advertising, and having 0 incentives to sell your data.
If you're not willing to trust our servers, I don't think the product is right for you. Hopefully we build trust as a company that does right by our users in the long run, unlike what I'm seeing from companies today.
Even if you have good intentions and don't sell them the information, what's the guarantee that these third parties won't use the information you provided them for personal gain anyway?
1. We'll be transparent about the services that we use. That way you'll know who your data is being shared to, and what data will be shared.
2. We'll try to take an Apple-like approach of anonymizing data as much as possible and only sharing the few pieces of information we need to deliver a better product.
I'm sorry there's no fool-proof way to guarantee perfect data privacy - at some point you'll have to trust us to do the right thing with your data. We hope that our incentives will . be aligned. Our service is predicated on keeping your information private and that's what you'll be paying for.