Rejected Solutions
The advocacy has declined to support the devices and software listed on this page for apparent violations in respecting customer information. While a product listed on this page may be guilty of blatant abuses, some are listed simply for abiguity in their information management practices or because they leave a door open for abuse.
Table of contents
Rejection Codes
The numbers in the "Why" column of the below table are defined as follows:- 1 - Ambiguous policy around the handling of stored content
- 2 - Policies/practices leave notable opportunity for abuse
- 3 - Product vendor policies or practices considered abusive.
Personal Data Center
No products of this classification have been rejected. This is primarily because these products are not abundant as of this writing and are usually first reclassified as "Personal Clouds" before being rejected.
Personal Clouds
Devices or software primarily focused on either file sharing, or file synchronization access to data.
| Product | Why | Explanation |
|---|---|---|
| WesternDigital MyCloud |
1,2,3 | Western Digital gets high marks as being one of the few companies that has product specific privacy policy. Unfortunately the contents of that policy reveals that the product being purchased collects data for corporate use, to include advertising and marketing purposes. The word "may" is used quite a bit and they do state that the data is used to "improve their products. Participation in collection of data from a purchased device needs to be optional, with words like "may" being replaced with words like "at customer discretion." |
Social Network
Devices or software primarily focused on the structured sharing of conversational information with designated participants.
| Product | Why | Explanation |
|---|---|---|
| Oxwall | 3 | The Oxwall software is attractive and well featured. It is easily installed at hosting services using nearly one-click methods and can be installed on personal servers as well. The advocacy is declining endorsement of this software due to it's integration of centrallized social network trackers on the "Overview" admin screen that are not optional. The software also incorporates the facebook interface platform by default. This is not considered cause for exclusion in itself because the software is included as "opt-in," but it didn't help Oxwall's case after the required use of the trackers was discovered. |
Chat Tools
Products primarily used to provide short messages between individuals and sometimes support a complete conversation.
| Product | Why | Explanation |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | Twitter is commonly know to profile and process communication contents and met-data into demographics and profile information for the purpose of monetization in it's sale to marketers and other parter unknown to the information originators. Twitter is a good platform for public discourse, such as celebrities and companies making comments to stay in contact with their followers. Twitter should never be used for personal conversations however. | |
| SnapChat | 3 | The SnapChat privacy policy makes it pretty clear that, while they delete message content quickly, they do make close examination of meta-data to derive profile, relationship and influence information for resale to marketers and other partners unknown to information originators (you). |