NotchUp, Privacy Down
Written by Russ on January 27, 2008 – 11:03 amLately, I’ve seen a few discussions in regards to various forms of social/business networking, etc. I’ve also received a few invites to join NotchUp, which appears to be the new kid on the block, and I started to enter into their process since I was invited to the “Beta” by a couple of known and trusted colleagues.
In part of checking them out, I do what I always do whenever I see checkbox that says that I agree to someone’s terms of use–I read their terms of use.
From the start, NotchUp’s terms of use doesn’t read like the other places I trust. In fact, it reads like something familiar. It reads like something from a company I worked for many years ago that tried to sign people up for a job site only to in turn sell their information to companies. I’m sure you’ve seen several of these, some of them are akin to College Scholarships “just for signing up for free magazine subscriptions”.
Since my spider-sense was tingling, I knew I needed to read on–so I did:
9. NotchUp reserves the right to offer third party services and products to You based on the preferences that You identify in your registration and at any time thereafter; such offers may be made by NotchUp or by third parties.
That’s right: NotchUp can sell your information to third parties.
Full disclosure here: I did not get through the rest of their registration because, frankly, I don’t like to agree to Terms of Use before I get to see just what my privacy settings can be. They do offer up such a tab in their settings, but it is disabled and not viewable.
10. Without limiting any of the other disclaimers of warranty set forth in these Terms, NotchUp does not provide or make any representation as to the quality or nature of any of the third party products or services purchased through NotchUp.com or any other NotchUp Site, or any other representation, warranty or guaranty. Any such undertaking, representation, warranty or guaranty would be furnished solely by the provider of such third party products or services, under the terms agreed to by the provider.
This basically says that once you’re on someone else’s email list (after they’ve sold your information), they no longer take any ownership of how it is used. Think about that one. It can translate loosely to this:
Once we sell your information, it’s out of our hands. If you change your privacy settings with us, we’ll follow that setting, but if someone we’ve sold your list to sells that list or does not allow you to remove yourself from it, etc. etc. we’re not responsible. There would be a lot of hurdles to overcome to find out just where in the heck your name has ended up.
Not only that:
18. You understand and acknowledge that you have no ownership rights in your NotchUp account (“NotchUp Account”), and that if you cancel your NotchUp Account, all your account information from NotchUp, including resumes, profiles, cover letters, network contacts, saved jobs, questionnaires and email mailing lists, will be marked as deleted in NotchUp’s databases and will be removed from any public area of the NotchUp Sites. Information may continue to be available for some period of time because of delays in propagating such deletion through NotchUp’s web servers. In addition, third parties may retain cached copies of your Information.
“Marked as deleted” – got that? Not removed, but flagged as deleted and no longer publicly displayed. They’ll still have it, still own it. Those third parties may retained “cached copies” of your information–which means that they’ve got a snapshot view from a specific purchase point and they may continue to use the list from a specific date or merge it with a new list, etc.
19. Your email and other data that you submit as part of the resume will be made available to our recruiters and employers. NotchUp.com doesn’t have any control over how that data would be used. If you don’t want any such data to be displayed your only remedy is not to post any resume.
At least this is pretty black and white. But, of course, since the purpose of NotchUp is to connect employers and candidates, it sure seems pretty useless to have a profile without a resume, right? At least the listed this right up top and not 2/3s of the way down on their Terms of Use page.
Oh. Wait.
I should also mention that the only way you can find out about their privacy policy and terms of use is currently, at the time of this writing, by attempting to sign-up and following the link.
They do a fine job of telling you how safe and secure their site is. You have to read between the lines to understand just how little they’re actually offering you. My gut feeling was that they want you to feel that your information is secure and you can control how the other users of the site can view you–which is great. But what about the people who buy lists from them?
There is the potential to give up a lot of your rights to your resume and personal information, in my opinion. I’m posting this as caution to folks here—this site feels like a bandwagon with a “generate a mailing list” approach to it. I’ve worked for those companies in the past and the end result seems to be me feeling as if I need to create a new email account and trying desperately to remove my personal information from, well, just about everywhere.
Maybe it sounds a bit overly-concerned, and I’ll accept that. I’ll also say that I’ve been the victim of identity theft more than once in the past and it’s not fun having to deal with it. Since NotchUp takes ownership of your information and sells it to who knows who, you really are just exposing yourself without any real means of controlling how that works. And NotchUp isn’t on the hook for anything.
LinkedIn, for what it’s worth, takes its approach this way:
• We will never rent or sell your personally identifiable information to third parties for marketing purposes
• We will never share your contact information with another user, without your consent.
• Any sensitive information that you provide will be secured with all industry standard protocols and technology
That’s pretty nice of them, and I think that’s what we’d all prefer.
Interestingly enough, NotchUp allows you to “instantaneously import your LinkedIn profile into NotchUp to use as your NotchUp profile.” That means that all that privacy protection you get at LinkedIn could be gone within moments. In essence, they’re taking advantage of our lack-of-desire to fill out yet another profile form, using technology to ease that pain, and then potentially reaping the rowards of selling that data.
Likewise, Facebook says this (and we all know they’ve faced some scrutiny):
Facebook follows two core principles:
1. You should have control over your personal information.
Facebook helps you share information with your friends and people around you. You choose what information you put in your profile, including contact and personal information, pictures, interests and groups you join. And you control the users with whom you share that information through the privacy settings on the My Privacy page.
2. You should have access to the information others want to share.
There is an increasing amount of information available out there, and you may want to know what relates to you, your friends, and people around you. We want to help you easily get that information.
It’s easy to jump on the proverbial bandwagon when it comes to social networking—or even professional networking. We all have a couple of things about any site or application that we wish were improved–even the ones we’ve worked on the design for. It makes it easy for a company to come out with an updated approach to something we already find some benefit in using. Unfortunately, it’s just as easy for these companies to throw out a privacy policy that is easy to ignored—and then your privacy could be as well.
I urge you all to proceed with caution and I urge you to take the time to read—very carefully—the terms and conditions, privacy policies, histories and about us sections of any websites you consider joining. NotchUp’s next-to-last statement kind of summarizes what’s happening on their site:
The only winners in all of this are job boards and headhunters.
That’s right, they summarize by saying the above, but the truth is in what they do NOT tell you:
They’ve created a new winner if enough people sign up: NotchUp.
Posted in Rant, Social Networking | 10 Comments »
On top of all the privacy concerns, when trying to connect, log in, edit profile the servers continually time out and fail to load pages. Not very comforting.
So far, I’m amazed that most reviewers don’t even bother to go through the site and understand what they have the potential to give up.
It seems to be a good gamble on the side of the NotchUp developers–people ARE signing up and spreading the word.
But, besides all of this frivolous “Privacy” concern that I have, is anyone actually making any money?
I’m from Missouri, I’ll have to see it to believe it.
[...] writing my post “NotchUp Privacy Down“, I’ve been Googling through the web to find out what people are thinking out in the [...]
Hey guys,
This is one of the founders of NotchUp.
You’re absolutely right. We wrote the privacy policy as we were building the site, and as such erred on the side of making it overly broad (since we didn’t know exactly what the site would end up encompassing when we launched).
We’re working with our lawyers now to make the privacy policy reflect our values (we protect, not violate your privacy). Once it’s changed, we’ll post it in the footer so everyone can see it (an oversight, not a malicious error I take full responsibility for).
Best,
Rob Ellis
Co-founder
Then prove it and change your Terms of Service.
Until that point in time, your TOS is definitely not explaining what you’ve explained above and you’re not legally obliged to follow it. It doesn’t protect anyone and does not–AT ALL–back up what you just typed above and on other websites.
Until it is changed, you have the freedom to do as you please. Your own TOS states that if you want to protect your privacy, the best way to do so is to NOT UPLOAD A RESUME.
So, in plain speak, that means the best way to protect yourself is to not use the site.
Awesome.
Stop trying to fool people.
Fix the problem now–make it a priority. Make it a Press Release.
Show the world you’re every bit as serious about our Privacy as you have been about putting your site out there to get people in.
We’ll be waiting.
I’ll be the first person to toast you when it happens*.
*Right after you explain the design similarities to GrandCentral.com. Sorry, you’re going to have to earn my respect back.
[...] registrants and potential notchup.com candidates may be interested in reading about potential privacy issues they may encounter using the site. Others may prefer to dive in with wild [...]
Whoa!
Everybody take a deep breath …
It’s in BETA, no one is forcing anybody to sign up, you are free to wait until you are more comfortable with the TOS to sign up at any point in the future.
Rob, congrats on the successful launch!
I joined up, but I was also pretty concerned by the policies. I took a conservative approach, and did not put anything in there that isn’t already publically available elsewhere, like LinkedIn and my homepage.
I did not import my settings from LinkedIn – who even uses these things? I see red and hear klaxon warnings when these handy importers are shown to me…
Thanks for pointing out that little loophole. I wont be using that site now.
Well, it looks like the honeymoon is over for NotchUp. They appear to have some competition. There’s a new site called Applicant Tree which is offering a very similar service. [link to Press Release] Instead of paying you to interview, they’re going to pay you every time a company wants to look at your résumé. They might be on to something. You get paid without the hassle of having to get all dressed up in your monkey suit.