Add sponsor RemoveMyPhone to organizations list. #2110
Conversation
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https://www.removemyphone.com/ seems rather fishy after I took a look. Obviously not a team member, but here are my 2c:
This is a misleading claim as no service is 100% secure. Even the NSA got hacked.
So a team of 12 popped out of nowhere with little previous Internet presence, makes misleading security claims, claims to be partner of Mozilla, EFF & others. Yeah no, that rings the bell for me. Notice you mention:
I question why you should consider associating your valued brand with such an entity. Please guard sponsorship as good as you guard recommendations. There really should not be the possibility to simply pay 250$ to cheat your way around everything PrivacyTools as a project stand for. |
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Generally I don't understand why you accept donations as sponsorship from sketchy VPN companies etc. It goes really against the message and other policies of PTIO. |
This is not the case. The sponsorships that we do accept are clearly defined under the sponsorship rules. They help pay for the services you all use..
You're not. I normally don't handle anything to do with the sponsorship program. We like to keep contributors at arms length from any sponsorship related activities. With @jonaharagon handing over things to @blacklight447-ptio I was hoping they would weigh in on comment. In any case it cannot be approved until a code owner gives it their mark of approval/disapproval. If they disapprove it for whatever reason, then they will reverse the donation. |
True @davegson, they don't seem to be on eff.org/thanks even though they claim to support it. I should have investigated a little further before I approved. |
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Since this turned out into a longer discussion, a disclaimer: I'm co-founder of Safing, sponsor of PTIO. I try to walk my talk, but keep that in mind. Hi Thomas, aka @removemyphone-dev, thanks for joining. Though I read your whole message, I will only answer to the core of what bugs me about you. I do not enjoy discussing with walls of text, my time is just as limited as yours.
This is where you are lying. You donate and claim there is nothing more to it, implying pure benevolence - but on the other hand you proudly slap all of these very established brands on your homepage to make it seem that your company is just as trustworthy as those. That is your "more". You even mention it yourself in your last paragraph.
So you yourself tell us it's not "nothing more", there are strings attached (to the big chunk at least). I'll leave you with this: the privacy community sees right through shady marketing, and shady marketing was the core of each of my criticism points. One of the core values of PTIO is transparency, you are well advised to hold that value high yourself (which you currently don't). I can only urge you to listen and adapt. If you don't want to take my word for it, I'm happy to link this thread on reddit and let others chime in. Cheers, PS: other sponsors deserve the same scrutiny as you, happy if anyone and everyone exposes shady behavior in others too, by all means, turn every stone. Also at Safing. The PTIO team surely appreciates community input, PrivacyTools will only benefit with more ppl chiming in |
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@dngray if these companies are so well why are they not recommend in the general section? It makes it seem very untrustworthy. I think the service @removemyphone-dev is interesting, but seems limited to a few websites. I have doubts about them storing your information in the US, this is not to be recommended for EU citizens. |
If you were reffering to me here, I wasn't trying to start any drama. That's not my aim. Hope everyone understands. |
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@freddy-m I assume he was referring to me, as in a community member, not a team member
@removemyphone-dev, I did call your company fishy, described your marketing as shady and called you out for lying (which is different from you being a liar). Anyway, in all of these cases, I described extensively why I perceive what I perceive. I guess what also plays its part is a cultural difference. It is very germanic to be blunt, and if seen fit, even harsh instead of beating around the bush as may be more common in other cultures. Personally, even if words are harsher than preferred, I try to see all criticism as a chance to listen and react. It is often critics who care most.
Maybe I was unclear: I do not criticize you for mentioning it, but for mentioning it in the header of your landing page. Along with the unverifiable claim "support and partner". That is 5 steps too far. From what I can tell it is only "support/sponsor". I see this as an example of what I call shady marketing. But in the end, Thomas D. and I seem to be spinning in circles. So I too see no value in a continuation of this conversation. I agree it is up to PTIO to make decisions about their sponsorship criteria. I liked your input @ph00lt0 in this regard:
Maybe we should ask the community what they think? Maybe link to reddit so we get broader views? Our view here is rather limited since the only unbiased person is @ph00lt0. |
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I do not think there's nothing wrong with saying you support X or Y project, but I do think it is out of bounds to say you are in a partnership with those organizations when you aren't. As for the rest of the stuff, I do not care that there are fake followers or whatever on their Twitter account, I think it's okay to pay for advertising and you can't be verifying every account that follows you, regarding the team performing different tasks even though the official title says something else, I'm also fine (hell, I once worked in a restaurant and I had to take turns to be the cook and the delivery, I'm not saying it's the best way of doing this, but that's another discussion). All in all, I think that as long as they do what they promise, I'm okay with it, but what worries me a bit more is how would I know they're not going to do something like that again. I don't understand the Germanic thing, though. |
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thanks for sharing your point of view.
I'm from Austria, and our culture is similar to Germany / Switzerland. In all three countries we speak German, so "germanic" is a term to describe the culture that comes from the German speaking countries. There are for sure many other cultures which are straight forward/blunt, so it's not unique to us, it just was a way to describe where it comes from in my case |
Will do, unfortunately I haven't heard from our community manager @blacklight447-ptio, who I believe has access to that side of things. Neither @freddy-m or myself have access to financial side of things. As for what has been discussed here, I have not yet had the time to read it in depth yet. |
This is irrelevant to determining the inclusion of RemoveMyPhone as a sponsor.
This is a valid point, I see no concrete proof of them being partners with those entities. Their landing page is misleading with "We're proud to support and partner with industry-leading online privacy and information security organizations.".
EFF does also not show them on their /thanks page. If we are going to accept RemoveMyPhone as a sponsor, I think they should make a clear distinction between sponsoring and partnering with entities.
Also a valid point.
This is marketing lingo, and is generally misleading to get users to buy their products. PayPal has had a good track record for security, but the privacy of PayPal is questionable. At the least, assuming you do not give RemoveMyPhone your credit card or debit card information; PayPal will keep financial information out of RemoveMyPhone's hands. Saying it is 100% safe and private is misleading, but I may let this slide as it is just a way to say hey "it is likely your financial information will not be exposed, and we do not have access to it".
Irrelevant, and offensive.
It is not our business how they run their company, and is not needed to determine whether or not they should be sponsored.
This is irrelevant, and seems offensive. We do not need to know who wrote those blog posts.
Seem being the key word here. A comparison of Safing's followers to RemoveMyPhone's followers was not needed. Your companies clearly have different target demographics, which will result in different kinds of followers.
Do you have any proof that those 1,000 followers are fake? I admit it is suspicious; it could indicate that RemoveMyPhone is allocating more of their resources towards getting the product in users' hands rather than providing a better product. However for the life of their company it could be critical to obtain more customers.
Your hostility persists. You can either participate in a respective manner, or not at all. @removemyphone-dev After reading through everything here, your company's Privacy Policy, and analyzing some of the connections your website makes, I am not in favor of the sponsorship. We do not want to recommend or advertise software, or services that use extensive tracking techniques on its users, or collect vast amounts of information on users (which your service does for the sake of removing information on other platforms and services, and improving your own service):
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I've been having a look at this post today. Sorry for the delay. I made sure to read each post in sequence, and thus I made notes along the way. I did it this way because I wanted to share my own opinions - without echoing what others have said.
Sponsorship does not necessarily indicate we use these products. What it does indicate is these companies have given us money to run our services. Many companies approach us because they like the ethics of how PrivacyTools is run or the other information we provide which is out of scope of their business to provide.
We wouldn't take your money if we weren't going to approve the sponsorship. As the money has already been sent through we would naturally reverse that transaction pending final result. Reflecting upon this, we (PrivacyTools) should develop a process for which sponsorships are approved, and in what order, so we don't risk a repeat of this.
As this is an open discussion, these things can happen. I'm usually pretty good at filtering and being objective about advice and criticism. I believe the benefit of a public record discussion outweighs any negatives.
Would it be possible to have a page that links to the public sites where you have reviews? Customarily many sites have a "testimonials" page. You may have to ask your customers whether they permit their testimonial being public on your website though. My remaining caution would be directed the privacy policy that @lynn-stephenson mentioned in his reply #2110 (comment)
Some of the uses outlined in the privacy policy seem a bit open-ended. This might mean that the information is used for something that the customer did not originally intend or approve:
Hypothetical situation:
I'm not suggesting for a moment that you would, but the wording in that privacy policy leads me to believe that it would be possible. There is a lot of very important data collected that would be valuable other parties. |
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Even though I also think they collect a lot of information I kind of understand that it is necessary for a service like this, and even though my opinion is not relevant here, I think that if they improve their privacy policy and make sure that the information they collect is encrypted in some place safe I would be fine using their services. |
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I still think replacing Google Analytics would be a really, really go idea. I don't care if they provide the best service and their product is good, they suck users' data and could sell that to other third parties. |
This is the exact problem, PTIO seems to apply a double standard. Listing these companies gives your user base the feeling they can trust these vendors, while they should not. I understand you need to cover some of the costs, but this, in my opinion, is not the right way.
@removemyphone-dev if you do not understand that Google Analytics is not privacy friendly you are in the wrong community here. This shows the double standard again. A product would never be allowed under general tools would it be using this invasive spyware. @dngray that companies like PTIIO, does mean that they must be mentioned on the homepage. If they comply with our view on ethics, privacy requirements they could be listed as highlighted sponsor. You now settle for financial benefit and trade in privacy. |
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@ph00lt0 There is a clear problem with double standards, and as new members are joining PrivacyTools we are stepping in to fill the gaps, and in a way we are enforcing stricter non yet defined policies. Which I have noticed with me rejecting software that does not meet a higher standard of security, when there is no policy to go by and there is software recommended right now that I would probably reconsider. As such it is probably best to hold off on sponsoring anyone until we have a policy to go by. |
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If it is worth something I feel you are right, but I've never participated before in a discussion regarding sponsors, and I'm not part of the team, but what I said before I would say it again to anyone trying to create a privacy focused bussines |
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Hi,
Yeah I did not approve those, the member responsible for that was more permissive in the past. We've since discussed this internally and are thinking of making a concise criteria (as we have done for various pages) in order to create uniform fairness. This particular sponsorship has outlined that being a necessary improvement for us.
It is, and I would be looking at existing sponsors as well once we apply a new criteria. What I think we might do for the time being is decline the sponsorship for now. You're welcome to do so at a later date once we re-open sponsorships. I think that's the most fair thing to all.
This would need to either be something we consider universally in the criteria or not. We cannot single out individual sponsors and say they must do certain things, while others are given a free pass.
As I said, it's impossible for us to use all the products of our sponsors. The reason for that is, some of us aren't in the intended market. An example, I'm never going to be in the US market, so if a product is targeted at US demographics - it isn't going to be applicable to me. In the past sponsorships were added by @jonaharagon who had a general look over the product. Without a set criteria, this was more of a "sniff test" than anything else. This particular PR has indicated we should be more transparent about this, and develop a criteria in order to remain consistent. I think the main area will be reviewing the sponsor's Privacy Policy.
I think this is exactly the issue. In the past I was not responsible for sponsorships at all. I generally as a contributor kept out of that. I maintained this position in order to keep my impartiality when it came to researching recommended suggestions on the website.
This is the step I think which is most fair to all. You're welcome to revisit this, when we have a criteria, and I invite you to offer any suggestions in regard to our criteria, once we get something underway.
No they did not. They were added by @jonaharagon 08a8597, 10df29c, 34c099e who has since handed over operations to @blacklight447-ptio (Niek de Wilde). There was a blog post about it. The way these things worked in the past is that a sponsor would approach us as you did @removemyphone-dev and then it would get added without too much discussion. It is unfortunate you've decided to sponsor us at this time of reorganization. It also appears that @blacklight447-ptio has been difficult to get a hold of (which happened at about the time you'd already sent the money through). I will keep on it, if you could leave it with me for a bit longer I should be speaking to @blacklight447-ptio soon. I still want to make this right, and return your money to you.
Ultimately sponsorship approval is up to team members, and not members of the community, though we do like to hear their thoughts. Some people are a little more tactful than others, 🙂. I enter every discussion assuming the other party is of good faith unless I have evidence to indicate otherwise. |
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Hey again, I just wanted to quickly chime in and mention two things. @lynn-stephenson yes you are right. Re-reading my posts I must admit that my posts were unnecessarily hostile. Something triggered me and made me full on rage instead of raising concerns in a respective manner. @removemyphone-dev, I am sorry for being unprofessional toward you and for insulting your team. (I edited my initial post to be more respectful as I don't see any value in having others read it the original way). Second, I am looking forward to the PTIO team creating a criteria for all sponsors, thanks for your starting efforts in that regard. I agree that this is the correct approach so everyone is treated equally, as it currently is for the tools you recommend. |
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Description
Add RemoveMyPhone sponsor to list. They made a $250 donation.