Muut is making some changes to our terms of service, privacy policy, and user experience effective May 25, 2018. These updates reflect new compliance requirements under the European Union’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) law.
We’ve always tried to keep things easy to understand for regular people. You shouldn’t need to be an internet security expert to understand the basics, and that extends to our goals when it comes to privacy and data.
Privacy has always been a focus for our service, and the GDPR in most areas only codifies positions we’ve always held regarding sharing personal data. The primary changes for GDPR compliance come in the form of an updated Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, and for users that require it, a Data Processing Addendum.
We’re also adding some tools for both end users and community owners to control your personal data further.
For end users: we’re adding the ability to anonymize your account, which will remove the personal data — email, hashed password, avatar, and username — from our system.
For community owners: We’re expanding the tools available for removing content, to make it easier to comply with removal requests from users, and bulk manage user content. Stay tuned for details in the upcoming weeks!
As for our privacy policy and terms of service, you want to know how Muut collects and uses data and now it’s even easier to find out with the simplified privacy policy as required by GDPR, but we’d like to make it even simpler and go over how Muut collects and uses data. There are two types of user data Muut collects:
Non-anonymized data: Your @username, email address, display name, and avatar.
Anonymized data: Things like how many users logged on in the last week, or general engagement numbers.
We do not store non-anonymized behavior data (or any other non-anonymized data for that matter) on our end and never have. We’ve also never shared end-user data. Our strict privacy policy has always protected users, and our commitment to those principles we made in our manifesto remains the same; that means no selling your data. A business model that relies on sharing data with third-party services incentivizes bad actors, so you can continue to count on our commitment to keeping your information safe, secure, and right where you put it.
Keen observers will notice that some of these changes do conflict with the manifesto we wrote when launching Muut in 2013. The internet has become a different place in the last five years, and it’s time for new levels of control when it comes to data privacy. Muut has grown a lot, and these new changes reflect an evolution of our priorities and values.
We work to make Muut better every day and hope these updates improve your experience.
If you have any questions or feedback about our GDPR compliance, new policies, or just want to say hello, please feel free to contact us.