There was a discussion about blueorganizer privacy on Adam’s post about blueorganizer, that I thought was worth blogging about.
One of the comments was:
What’s their privacy policy? Does this convenient tool cost in terms of information given?
Pardon my cynicism. You can never be too careful and the way people sell information these days makes me sick.
This is a very legitemate and important concern. Let me address this question and expand on it. First of all, one of the founding principles of adaptiveblue states:
“Your information, preferences and habits are private. They are your individual assets, and no one has the right to use them without your permission. It is your choice to decide whether to share your information or not, with whom to share it, and when.”
We have and will be adhering to this principle. Specifically here are the things that you already saw in blueorganizer and will see as of version 2.4
- All user data stored securely online using Amazon S3 simple storage service.
- Each bluemark can have visibility: private, public or bluecircle (coming soon).
Private bluemarks are never visible to others. - The format of the bluemarks is straighforward and open. On each computer, a set of bluemarks stored under Mozilla Profile/blueorganizer directory.
- The format of the bluemark XML files is straightforward and readable by people without any technical background. In the future, there will be sections on adaptiveblue web site explaining this format.
- The user is able to export the bluemarks, to back them up, etc.
- The user is able to delete the blueorganizer account. This will cause ALL user data to be erased both on Amazon S3 and locally.
- The user is able to create multiple accounts. This is handy when you need security beyond public/private bluemark scheme.
it is worth mentioning, that we have had discussions with Ed Batista on making the blueorganizer compliant with AttentionTrust privacy principles. As of version 2.4 all, but the Mobility principle is going to be met. The mobility is still not satisfied, because you can only store your data on Amazon S3 at this time. If there is going to be enough objections to this from our user base, we will look to give people a choice where to store the bluemarks.
Going forward, our goal is to build a set of services that utilize your data to make you be more effective online. These services will never do anything with your data without your explicit permission. If you feel like the service is not beneficial, you can always opt out.
We hope that this post is helpful and if you have additional questions please feel free to post here or email support [at] adaptiveblue.com.
Alex
