CEO of SCRUFF here, and daily reader of HN. We have not, do not, and would not share this information with third parties.
The data that we share with our third-party ad providers is:
- Your location (so you can get those local car dealer ads)
- Your gender
- Your age
- The targeting keyword "gay"
We currently use AdMob and MoPub to provide our network advertising.
More broadly, this kind of information is never something we would share. We know the sensitivity of HIV status, and know that it has been used to discriminate against our community in the past. When we do take money from direct advertisers (full-screen ads shown at launch), we make sure that they are promoting relevant and beneficial products for our community, and the ads they place are serviced 100% in-app and come with no extra data nor api calls.
Ultimately, our business model is based on subscriptions, which means we are successful when we make software that people love to use. We don't spend our days trying to squeeze a marginal penny out of some remainder-bin ad unit by trading personal data of our users. Instead, we spend our time focused on how to make an excellent product, that works reliably, is free of spambots and harassment, and connects gay guys with each other and the global gay community.
Thanks for the reply! Long time subscriber, first time caller here. What are you doing to protect the information of people who aren't out or even gay on your platform? Do you share whether or not someone identifies as trans, bisexual, dl, msm, straight etc? You have information that's just as sensitive and private as HIV status that from your reply it seems like you haven't considered. I love your platform and would hate to see anyone outed for any part of their identity by Data you supply to an ad network
For these third-party ad networks, they accept a lat/lng, so we (and I suspect most apps) just pass in a value obtained from the device.
That said, upon further reflection, a local advertiser could surely get enough targeting information with a much, much less precise value...we'll look into making this change in a future release.
Our paid users do not see third-party ad network ads, so no.
There are other third party services we use that may see various pieces of information from free and paid members. Stripe, for example, manages some payment processing and collects some user data; ZenDesk manages support tickets for us and also collects various pieces of user data.
In the coming months we will be sharing more information about the third parties with whom we work and on whom our service is built, and how data is shared between them. When it comes to ad networks, however, our integration is limited to what I mentioned above.
The data that we share with our third-party ad providers is:
- Your location (so you can get those local car dealer ads)
- Your gender
- Your age
- The targeting keyword "gay"
We currently use AdMob and MoPub to provide our network advertising.
More broadly, this kind of information is never something we would share. We know the sensitivity of HIV status, and know that it has been used to discriminate against our community in the past. When we do take money from direct advertisers (full-screen ads shown at launch), we make sure that they are promoting relevant and beneficial products for our community, and the ads they place are serviced 100% in-app and come with no extra data nor api calls.
Ultimately, our business model is based on subscriptions, which means we are successful when we make software that people love to use. We don't spend our days trying to squeeze a marginal penny out of some remainder-bin ad unit by trading personal data of our users. Instead, we spend our time focused on how to make an excellent product, that works reliably, is free of spambots and harassment, and connects gay guys with each other and the global gay community.