Put back user privacy protections for mergers/acquisitions

[mattflaschen]

The old privacy policy had:

"Your personal information
-and other data collected by us may be transferred to another company that has
-acquired our stock or assets, for example, as a result of a sale, merger,
-reorganization, dissolution or liquidation. If such a transfer occurs, the
-acquiring company's use of your personal information will still be subject to
-this Privacy Policy."

The new says personal info can be shared:

"In connection with, or during negotiations of, any merger, sale of App.net assets, financing or acquisition of all or a portion of our business to another company"

with no clause about "will still be subject to this Privacy Policy". Please put back this protection from the original.

You should also not allow transfer of personal information during negotiations, which is another unfortunate addition. Sharing aggregated information during negotiation would be okay.

[jimrhiz]

Recall that the Core Values say:

We are selling our product, NOT our users.
We will never sell your personal data, content, feed, interests, clicks, or anything else to advertisers. We promise.

This would be a hollow promise if our personal data are sold to some other company that then sells them to advertisers. Although the new privacy policy Matt quotes does say "Remember, we don't share your information with advertisers", it offers no protection against an indirect sale of our personal information to advertisers as a result of a merger, acquisition, etc during which the original "we" who made the promise disappear or change identity. This is one of the reasons why the Core Values need to be entrenched in the TOS as I advocate in issue #28, so that they cannot be weakened or abandoned.

[katcaverly]

"Core Values need to be entrenched in the TOS"

this is so very important, that it cannot ever be left to chance.