VirCotto posted a writing on FetLife about how Zoom is using your personal information for gain, and forwarding at least some of your details to Facebook.

Please don’t use Zoom for your online kink events (FetLife Link)

Zoom iOS App Sends Data to Facebook Even if You Don’t Have a Facebook Account (Vice article)

Yikes.

About six months ago, as I was planning the webinar projects we’re developing, I started looking into different systems. One stood out to me for various reasons:

1. No software to download. BIG PLUS. All browser based.
2. No need to “REGISTER” with the original company—that means I can control the privacy of my members.
3. The features were amazing.
4. And blah blah blah.

Fortunately, I found myself in a position to secure the uses of their services, and we now have regular webinars.

YAY!

Today, as I was reading through that writing, I was inspired to double-check. After all, there is no reason a company might not change a few things to their advantage in these chaotic times.

This is the response I got:

First our privacy policy:
https://www.livewebinar.com/legal/privacy

and EU GDPR:
https://www.livewebinar.com/legal/gdpr

where we state what data we collect.

I can assure you we do not transfer any of this data to any other places or company. All data is fully isolated and no one beside you has access to it.

The data in LiveWebinar is only used to produce reports for you and to provide you a working service, nothing else.

If zoom does what it says this is ridiculous :/

You can feel safe with LiveWebinar!

Christopher Milkowski, LiveWebinar.com

Which is perfect. Most excellent.

And yet, there is more I’d like to address.

Your Personal Information on Dating Kinky

This past week on Tuesday, I was in court for an online harassment/stalking case as the plaintiff.

The defendant suggested that I store sensitive information on my servers, including credit card numbers.

Which is partially true. I’d like to detail what my company gathers and how.

Here is our current privacy policy:

Dating Kinky, Inc. Privacy Policy

The key takeaways here are:

1. To join some of our webinars, we ask for your email address and a name. We do not require that this be your real name, or even your “real” scene name. Just a name we can call you. We use your email to send you follow-up information and make it easy for you to unsubscribe.
2. To purchase from us, you may give your bank account or credit card information. This information is not available to ME or my company. It is handled by PayPal or CCBill, and their years of privacy and their secure servers protect you.
3. When you sign up to pay for something, your “real name” data is available to me and my staff, and is stored our secure Amazon Cloud server. Same type of server that Netflix uses.
4. Your personal information is not used in any public-facing content.
5. To access certain types of information, a free membership is required on Dating Kinky. In some cases, this is handled by our membership software, which will collect your name. These are all optional things, and add to your use of the site, and choosing not to share your name (or sharing a false name) will not prevent you from accessing our webinars. (Note: if you use a false name, you will likely need to use PayPal as your payment choice, as CCBill double-checks name/card/account information.)

Any other information we collect that is available to the public is information you freely give, including:

• Nickname
• City/Location
• Sexual orientation
• Kink role(s)
• Kinks & Interests
• Photos
• Chat
• Writings
• Profile
• Etc.

I spend a lot of time in my book Dating Kinky (Sept 2018) talking about how to maintain privacy and anonymity when mating and relating as kinksters. I take your privacy very seriously, whether you are on my site or not.

And looking forward to the future:

Dating Kinky does not share, sell, or trade your personal information, ever.

So, for example, we recently hosted a giveaway for an InJoyUs. When we picked a winner, that winner was responsible for responding to us AND for forwarding their information as they wanted it to be used for shipping to NewLoveCreations.com.

We did not share that information directly.

Newsletters

Our email lists are managed separately from membership and are specifically designed to provide information in an easy opt-in and opt-out manner.

We follow all CAN-SPAM compliance regulations, and have recently install double opt-in on our emails.

This means when you enter your email to subscribe on our site, you’ll need to confirm your email to be added to our list.

And unsubscribing from our email does not affect your membership status, or vice-versa.

Promotions

On our site, we do have analytics that track anonymous connections by things like”

• IP
• Location
• Pages visited
• Etc.

This is not at all attached to WHO YOU ARE, until and unless you give us that information consensually.

It may be used to get feedback from you or to target you with a specific promotion (based on location, for example), but is not kept with personally identifiable data long term.

Also: Advertisements

We have a plan for accepting advertising moving forward.

And for tailoring the ads to the people our advertisers want to reach.

This will be done ONLY through information you have consented to share publicly on Dating Kinky.

So, like that list above:

• City/Location
• Sexual orientation
• Kink role(s)
• Kinks & Interests

They will not be targeted to you as an individual, nor will we mine your data (writings, or messages, for example) for additional information we can use.

I have personally had the experience of my Pet searching for something at Sur Le Table while I napped on his lap, and waking in the morning to their ads all over my Facebook feed.

I think that’s more than a few steps too far.

I won’t do it.

I will market to you based on what YOU say are YOUR interests—and I will listen to you as individuals and as a community about what’s working and what’s not moving forward.

Thank you for your support,

Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay