The privacy chaos
Data in the ad-tech era is becoming an increasingly complex matter. The number of parties that have access to data or the ability to extract data is often higher than you would ever expect. When you enter a random
site that is financed by advertising, you will find up to a hundred third-party players that collect data. This data is often forwarded to even more providers by each data collector, growing the the number of third-party companies that handle the data exponentially. Just signing an agreement or Data Protection Addendum that declares you are GDPR compliant does not help either. Not to mention that you are often just pushing the responsibility of gathering consent to other parties. A drastically different approach to privacy is to design the product in a way that does not require personal data—the Privacy by Design way.
A new way
Privacy by Design takes user privacy into all aspects of your development. Instead of randomly collecting as much data as possible, Privacy by Design requires you to build your product in such a way that data does not need protection. This is the approach we have chosen at Strossle.
By applying a strict view on privacy, we have deliberately limited our technical capability to collect personal data:
- * All private data (including IP addresses) are deleted within milliseconds.
- * We use artificial intelligence and machine learning to match the right content with the right user. Our algorithm focuses on what the user reads and what the user wants to read next by mapping out how topics and articles relate to each other in a way that no human can.
- * All third-party tracking is converted to server-side rendered responses, where all personal data is thoroughly removed.
This is Privacy by Design. A product that is built from the ground up with user privacy and GDPR in mind. In the future - the value of consumers data and consent to use it will be based on trust, and an exchange of value. GDPR is the first stage of a legislative environment where online privacy comes first. The next stage comes through the introduction of the e-privacy law (aka "the cookie law") scheduled for 2019-20. By being forward thinking about what online privacy truly means to consumers we are building a better, more user friendly internet. And this design has made us experts on how to offer a great user experience based on context.
