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appdotnet / terms-of-service

The App.net terms of service documents live here. To facilitate transparent discussion, we encourage users to create issues and/or submit pull requests with your feedback. Our general process is to incorporate user feedback on a roughly quarterly basis based on review with our legal team, but in the early stages this may occur significantly more often.
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The promised Core Values should be entrenched in the Terms of Service #28

Open jimrhiz opened 11 years ago

jimrhiz commented 11 years ago

At the bottom of the TOS page we see

App.net has made a promise to its users and developers. Learn more

with a link to http://join.app.net , where the promise is stated as "Core Values", frequently using the words "never" and "always".

That promise was a vital part of what made Dalton's proposal attractive.

Shouldn't the promise not only appear in the TOS, but be entrenched there with a guarantee that what is promised will not be changed?

I see parts of the promise in the TOS and Privacy Policy, but they are certainly not entrenched ("We reserve the right to modify these Terms at any time."). Furthermore, the clear and plain language of the promise is not reflected in the quite legalistic language of the ToS. It's not that I don't have trust in the intentions of Dalton and the team, but circumstances and teams can change; the promise and the Core Values should not change.

For the record, I'm quoting the promise here. (As one example of the significance of this, issue #17 about deletion is just a special case of the "You own your content" section of the promise.)

APP.NET CORE VALUES

We are selling our product, NOT our users. We will never sell your personal data, content, feed, interests, clicks, or anything else to advertisers. We promise.

You own your content. App.net members will always have full control of their data. Members have the fundamental right to easily back-up, export, and delete ALL of their data, whenever they want.

We will align our financial incentives with members & developers. In this paid model, the more people that value our service highly enough to pay for it, the more money we make. Our financial incentives are entirely tied to successfully delivering a service you can depend on, not on holding our ecosystem hostage.

App.net employees spend 100% of their time improving our services for you, not advertisers. Rather than waste most of our engineering time coming up with new and exciting ways to sell your personal data to advertisers, 100% of our engineering and product team will be focused on building the most innovative and reliable service we can.

We will operate a sustainable, predictable business. App.net will always have a clear business model. We know that depending on services that could go away or desperately squeeze users for more and more money is a toxic cycle. We want our ecosystem to rest easy that App.net is built on a financially solid foundation.

We respect and value our developer community. We believe that developers building on our platform are increasing the value and attractiveness of our service to paying members, and thus our financial interests are fundamentally aligned. We hope developers build large, robust businesses on top of our platform. Even if it means that we will likely forgo some huge future revenue streams, we will NEVER screw developers acting in good faith.

Our most valuable asset is your trust. Many people have become so cynical about user-hostile, privacy-violating social services that they refuse to participate at all. We can understand why. Earning your trust is the most important thing we can do. It won't be easy, and we will make some mistakes, but we will do our best to be honest and transparent.

mattflaschen commented 11 years ago

Excellent idea.

katcaverly commented 11 years ago

To codify (excuse the pun) the promise of App.net in the ToS explicitly, and to say what can never be changed, explicitly, would truly be ground breaking.