Your Privacy and Data Security on Squawkin: Post #1 of Many

Oct 16, 2014

Hey there, Squawkers.

There’s a lot of talk in the media these days about information security and data privacy. With good reason. It shouldn’t take a steady trickle of celebrity photo leaks and massive breaches of personal financial information at banks for people to know how seriously vulnerable their online data is. While people are starting to become aware of, and more savvy about, the threats out there, we’ve got a long way to go.

At Squawkin, we’re serious about doing all we can to help our users take control of their personal information and the data they post online. Does that mean we can’t ever be hacked? No, unfortunately it doesn’t. Anything is hackable, and anyone who tells you otherwise isn’t telling you the truth. However, there are steps that can be taken to make communication safer. That’s what we’re trying to do.

So what steps are we taking? Over a series of blog posts, of which this is the first, I’m going to talk about the ways Squawkin is working hard to do right by you when it comes to your privacy, the security of your data, and the protection of your personal information.

Here are a few:

You’re Not for Sale

- First and foremost, Squawkin never sells your information to any third party. This includes the entirety of the messages you send using Squawin — texts, photos and audio, location, everything. It also includes the limited personal information you share with us (your name, username, email address, password, and birthdate). That’s your information. It’s not ours to sell.

What’s Yours is Yours

- Speaking of information that belongs to you, the same is true of your the contacts in your phonebook and your user information from other apps and websites. Some folks have pointed out (sometimes with annoyance) that you can’t import contacts from your phonebook or from outside social media or messaging apps in order to share Squawkin with your friends. Trust us, we know it’s a bummer, and we’d love help you help us grow the app faster. But the reality is that we don’t allow that type of sharing because it’s an egregious breach of your privacy. Every time a service asks you to use your contacts or third-party login info to share, they have to collect and store that information, which is violation number one. To add to the problems, that information is then vulnerable to hackers and other people who aren’t you. You don’t want that and we don’t want that and that’s why we don’t do it.

We are, however, going to be launching a different type of sharing feature very soon, so that you can quench that burning desire to share the awesomeness that is Squawkin with everyone you care about and want to communicate and share with. In the meantime, you can send your friends to www.squawkin.com to download the app!

Next time, I’ll talk about privacy settings and how you can use Squawkin to take control of your communication like never before.

Squawk on!

Nish (nishithbhatt)

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