Rania experienced a miscarriage on a Tuesday, and by Thursday, she was receiving advertisements for fertility clinics, grief counsellors, and a type of herbal tea which was characterised as “comforting during difficult life situations.” She had not disclosed her loss to anyone and had not searched for any relevant information. The app simply noted that Rania had not moved for two days and updated her profile to reflect that.
Rania signed up for the Premium tier of the app that weekend, which cost $40 per month. This was done to eliminate the ads she was receiving.
The PrivacyPass programme is pleased that Rania was able to find a programme that suits her needs.
The free tier remains available for users who prefer the classic experience. Under this model, the platform watches, infers, and monetises users. The platform understands your political fears from your scrolling patterns; financial concerns from the hesitation you show when making a purchase; and loneliness from your late-night online activity, where you read the conversations of others. None of this information is sold to anyone specifically. It is aggregated and anonymised before being licensed to the platform’s partners. This is referred to in our Terms of Use as a “value exchange” and is accurate in the sense that the platform’s partners receive value from you and actually provide you with value in return for that exchange.
A summary of your data from the past week: Free tier summary
- Location shared with 34 partners. You visited a hospital on Wednesday, and 12 advertisers have updated their targeting profiles for you as a result of that visit.
- Search history is archived. Your searches for queries such as “How can I tell if my relationship is over?” were designated as life transition high purchase intention.
- Listening history is recorded. Sad playlists were recorded between Thursday and Saturday. Mood scoring has been updated, and insurance partners have been notified about your mood.
- Conversation sentiment analysis complete. You are 34% more irritable than last month. Your employer has not been informed. This is a free tier courtesy.
Premium users receive most of the above benefits. They only collect “first-party” data on your behalf and keep it internally for their own use and do not sell it to others; the word “sell”, as defined by our legal team, has an extremely specific meaning in Appendix C of this document. Advertisements based on your personal preferences will be changed to general use for the same products you don’t need; however, these products will not be procured based on your personal needs. Our marketing team has referred to this as “feeling like a human again,” and it has scored quite well in focus group tests.
The Elite Tier for $59.99 a month has a new feature called “Private Thoughts Mode”. This new feature stops inferences based on sound at the microphone input, pauses behaviour modelling, and suspends emotional scoring for up to 8 hours per day. The rest of the 16 hours, your account operates as normal; however, your thought processing will only operate on an 8-hr daily schedule.
A very small subset of Elite Tier users has contacted customer support wanting to know if their thoughts (which will be computed the following morning) were indeed retained as private during the 8 hrs when they had Private Thoughts Mode enabled. This is an interesting inquiry. Your thoughts that are captured for inference are based on your students’ behavioural patterns, and when you have Private Thought Mode enabled, the data will flow into a buffer instead of synchronously from the signal (meaning the system will process 8 hrs of signals associated with you in a batch by the system rather than hourly).
The subscription with the highest number of cancellations is Basic Privacy, at $9.99/month. Users have indicated via exit surveys that they believe the tier does not provide adequate privacy for what they pay for. To address this issue, we have changed the cancellation process by removing the exit survey for users who cancel and replacing it with three screens of personalised reasons for staying based on data we collected about them as they were deciding whether or not to cancel their subscription.
PrivacyPass will be launching Legacy Mode next quarter, which will allow you to pay a one-time fee of $799. This will permanently remove your data (except for a backup in case it’s needed to comply with applicable law). Any data that is retained for analytic purposes will be kept; however, those analytics will be kept in a separate location from your personal data to ensure legal compliance.
When Rania renewed her premium subscription last month, the businesses promoting their fertility clinics had ceased doing so. She expressed her appreciation on a phone call to a friend.
We have rated that phone call a 7 out of 10 on the Emotional Authenticity Index. The data from that phone call has been archived (Rania is a Premium subscriber, so we will not be selling that data).
Probably.