TheFunded Respects Its Users

According to a blog post by Jason Kincaid at Techcrunch, the VC firm ratings site, TheFunded, is being sued by a VC firm that received a bad review by an anonymous reviewer. According to Jason

There are a lot of VCs who hate TheFunded for exposing character flaws, and posting term sheets.

Jason also quotes a response from TheFunded’s founder Adeo Ressi

When TheFunded was conceived, we understood that some investors might attempt to take legal action against the views of entrepreneurs. In order to prevent this form of censorship, TheFunded has been carefully designed and takes extensive measures to protect the anonymity all those who share their opinions on the fundraising experience. TheFunded does not store IP addresses, email addresses, or any other personal information associated with a Member account in any database or any file system operated by the company.

This is exactly what every company should be doing. If you must have a member directory, save an email address with permission. I have written about this previously when speaking about Google but this approach applies to all websites. TheFunded has respected its users and allowed them to truly stay anonymous even on the company servers. I commend you Mr. Ressi for your restraint when it comes to collecting your users’ information. We should all reward companies that choose this route to protect their users. I smell a trend. Which companies out there can claim that their users are “Truly Anonymous?”

User Privacy Isn’t About Information Protecting, it’s About Information Collecting

I used to work for a company that generated most of its revenue from lead generation. It was a web publication where users registered to see premium content. We would work with big companies like IBM and Microsoft to sponsor webcasts and we would give the contact information of the users who viewed these webcasts to the respective sponsors. The users agreed to this in the Terms and Conditions and all was done fair and legally. This is how many free sites make their money. They sell your contact information to the highest bidder. I always had a problem with this concept. I’m not giving companies my contact information so they could sell it to the highest bidder. But what choice do I have?

With the new slew of web 2.0 companies, we’ve seen a backlash of sorts regarding this issue. One of the many definitions of web 2.0 is user-centricity. It’s all about pleasing the user. That means you don’t give away your users’ contact information. Wonderful. Out contact information is safe. Right? Well, in a recent court case, Google is forced to provide Viacom the usernames, IP addresses and online activity of all of their YouTube users. Apparently our information isn’t safe.

Michael Arrington at Techcrunch makes a good point about who is to blame here. Everyone wants to blame Viacom and it’s understandable. It’s an organization that has decided to fight their customers rather than work with them. Viacom is in the group of other media companies who have pushed the legal limits to track down people who love their content and sue them.

As Arrington points out, the real company to blame here is Google. Google is the one collecting this information on us. Until now, they thought (as did we), that our information was safe. Apparently, we were both wrong. Google needs to change their policy on how they track their users. For one thing, Google needs to make sure that any information on their servers cannot track someone down. That means no IP address saving, no mailing address saving, no credit card saving, etc….Secondly, (this might just be a marketing ploy) but we want a user contract. We want to know what information you save, how you use it, and who has access to it.

Viacom is evil, but Google is now their tool. Google needs to eliminate the possibility that our information will be used to track us down. That doesn’t mean hiring better lawyers. It means stop saving our personal information.