We must be stupid. I am being serious, we must be REALLY stupid.
It is possible that after many years of people blowing the whistle against people collecting personal information we still fall for it. Who am I refering to? But to Furl, of course. Because, you see, we are often in good faith, and when someone says:
Privacy
Privacy is probably a top priority for you. It certainly is for us at Furl. When you mark an item “private,” we respect your expectation that no one else will be able to see its contents. Other members cannot see your private items when they view your archive, and Furl Search (search all archives) is restricted to public items only. We have designed the Furl system to ensure that your private items and topics are secure. We will not sell your email address or privately-stored information, nor share it except in very specific cases described in our Privacy Policy.Access to the servers that house your archive is restricted to a very small number of employees. Procedures strictly prohibit accessing a member’s information, except when necessary to diagnose a problem or as specified in our Privacy Policy (such as when ordered by a court of law).
We’re members of Furl, too, and demand the utmost respect for privacy.
We kind of believe we are safe, right? Wrong! Let’s re read it:
We will not sell your email address or privately-stored information, nor share it except in very specific cases described in our Privacy Policy.
Again:
except in very specific cases described in our Privacy Policy.
We can put it in music:
except, except, except…
except, except, except in very specific cases described in our Privacy Policy.
And you should thank that this is no podcast.
But more, at the end of the same page:
Important Note
The contents of this page do not replace, modify or supercede Furl’s Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Please read them carefully before using Furl.
Let’s go and look at the privacy policy. After all those people at furl have our privacy as a top priority. Guess why?
And we don’t need to look very far to understand the true nature of the service:
Who is collecting my information?
Furl usually collects the requested information. However, Furl has chosen select partners in order to provide certain services. In order to use certain services on the Site, it may be necessary to enter information that then goes to our partner and is not kept by Furl.
We contract with Coremetrics, a service partner, to provide us with a data collection and reporting service for our Site. If you access the Site, Coremetrics may collect information about you on our behalf. For further information, including how to opt out of such data gathering, please see: http://www.coremetrics.com/info_eluminate2.html.
In other words: We don’t gather data, we let Coremetrics do it for us. And guess who is Coremetrics:
The company’s flagship product, Coremetrics Online Analytics 2004, is the industry’s only online marketing analytics platform that captures and stores all customer and visitor clickstream activity to build LIVE (Lifetime Individual Visitor Experience) profiles that serve as the foundation for all successful e-business initiatives. Through a patent-pending browser-based data collection technology, the Coremetrics Online Analytics 2004 Data Warehouse gathers and stores behavioral information directly from the visitor’s browser and records interactions in real-time to build LIVE Profiles.
It can hardly get worse than that.
But let’s keep on reading Furl Privacy Policy. After all our privacy is their first thought in the morning. Or so.
How does Furl use my information?
Furl’s primary goal in collecting personal information is to provide you, the user, with a customized experience on our service. This includes, or may include in the future, personalization services, interactive communications, online shopping, and many other types of services. In order to provide services free of charge, we will serve ads using content-targeting technologies, based on the content of your archived items.
But this is not all:
The following describes some of the ways that your information may be disclosed. Please note that this is not a complete list. The ways your information may be disclosed will change from time to time.
So even the privacy policy is not complete.
Or read this:
Coremetrics: Coremetrics may store certain data that we received from visitors to Furl (which may include email addresses), so that we may access this information via their reporting service. Furl will only use information shared with Coremetrics for proprietary Furl purposes. Coremetrics does not have the right to transfer your information to any party other than LookSmart.
Business Partners: LookSmart may disclose your personal information to our business partners in order to provide you with the services on the Site. If you have questions regarding the privacy policy or data-collection practices of one of our business partners, please contact that partner directly.
We are told the information is disclosed to business partners, but we are not told to whom. Yet we are asked to look at their privacy policy to understand what use do they do of this information.
They also spy when are you reading their e-mails:
We may also collect information through the use of “pixel tags” included in email messages we may send to you. Pixel tags are tiny graphic files, not visible to the human eye, that are included in HTML-encoded email messages. When such a message is opened in an HTML-capable email program, the recipient’s computer will access our server to retrieve the pixel tag file, allowing us to record and store, along with the recipient’s email address, the date and time the recipient viewed the email message, that the recipient’s email program is capable of receiving HTML-encoded email, and other standard logging information. The pixel tag also may see or read cookies.
The policy goes on, and forgive me for not analysing it all. I just didn’t have the guts. I understoo what I wanted, and here are my conclusions:
Conclusions
Furl collects personal information, gives this personal information to online partners for commercial purpose, including your e-mail address. Thus I don’t want to use furl and probably neither do you.
In short: Furl Sucks.
Amen.
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