Privacy. Many companies are scared of this word and treat it as a taboo subject, but it really shouldn’t be so scary. After all, companies spend loads of time and money to put privacy policies in place, and in the end, you, and only you, should be the one making the decision on whether or not your information is shared.
We at Xobni are huge privacy nuts (professionally and personally) and we understand what an honor it is to be so close to your inbox. This is exactly why we work with top privacy organizations such as the CDT and the PFF to make sure our products meet the highest industry standards – and more importantly, your (and our) standards.
Just in case you aren’t familiar with what we do and don’t do, here is a brief overview and also a link to our privacy policy…
Xobni Does:
Send a ping to our servers telling us that your Xobni client is being used, your email address, your IP address, how many invites have been sent and what version of Xobni you have, to help us with updates. If a user does decide to opt-in to one of our web services, such as our LinkedIn integration, we then communicate recipient email addresses for the sole purpose of retrieving their profile information from these services. This information is prohibited from being used for any other purpose.
Xobni Does Not:
Send email content, subject lines, or email account login and password information to our servers. Period. It’s that simple.
We want everyone to have a great experience when using Xobni, and to feel that their information and data is safe, so please continue to share your thoughts with us. We’ll keep listening to you and working with leading organizations to make sure our privacy policy is always top notch and meets everyone’s high standards of privacy.
November 8th, 2008 at 10:48 pm
I discovered your homepage by coincidence.
Very interesting posts and well written.
I will put your site on my blogroll.
November 17th, 2008 at 5:44 am
For what reason do you need the ip address? This is a quite critical information because it means that you can track the location of users.
November 17th, 2008 at 6:17 pm
“Send a ping to our servers telling us that your Xobni client is being used, your email address, your IP address, how many invites have been sent and what version of Xobni you have, to help us with updates.” You consider that to be private? We obviously have very different definitions of that word. I am not comfortable in having any of that information being transmitted to your servers, especially from my work email account.
November 18th, 2008 at 3:47 pm
Thanks for your questions. We do indeed take the privacy and security of data seriously. Our goal is to make the Xobni application work just like any website you visit. This allows us to update our application to respond to user needs and to offer services that have never before been seen in desktop software. IP addresses for example are something that is recorded by all companies when a user visits a company’s website. As we try to bring innovation to the world of desktop email we will follow some of the same steps it has taken for innovation to occur on the web.
Thanks,
Matt
Co-founder, Xobni
November 19th, 2008 at 6:22 am
>”IP addresses for example are something that is recorded by all companies when a user visits a company’s website.”
Poor argument Matt.
When I visit a website, I do not automatically leave my IP address, email address, number of Xobni invites sent and version of Xobni I am running. If the average person is really concerned about privacy the best solution is to simply “get off” the Internet.
November 23rd, 2008 at 11:00 am
Do you store the email address of the contacts from which we receive emails in and effort to build a network diagram of of our relationships?
November 27th, 2008 at 11:18 am
I read that when a new user installs Xobni that an email is sent to everyone in his or her contacts list. Is this true (or close to true)?
December 1st, 2008 at 12:40 pm
I will take that as a “Yes” we do store your emails addresses and build your network. Sort of naughty to not explain that.
March 24th, 2009 at 9:36 pm
How does that IP address-tracking work from inside a large enterprise; that is to say, how do the tracking activities work in an enterprise install version of Xobni when it’s collecting e-mail addresses, IP addresses, and invites sent (which could be extremely business-confidential–never mind privacy interests).
A lot of the people I advise would be very wary of that. Not because they’re necessarily concerned about privacy–although if cornered they _might confess they care–but more specifically because they’re typically the ones who like to keep tabs on others, not the other way around.
I figure RIM has a similar problem, as do many of the telco’s, but social networking startups like Xobni may have hit a nerve. The pressure is there to use cool products like yours, but when you collect data like that, it just pinches a bit.
Might be something to reconsider. I’m sure there’s a clever algorithmic solution there somewhere.