Product
Programs
Research
Blog
Careers
Donate
Get to know the people behind the code and the mission behind our work.
We at Meedan, Inc. and Meedan Labs, Inc. are trying to help the world understand itself a bit better, in our services and in the ways we engage with you, our users. We’re creating our services for you with the hope that you use them to help create a more credible and inclusive web. To better do that, we need to collect some personal information and data about you. As you use our services, we want to respect your privacy. Your trust is important to us, so we hope that these privacy policies clarify the kinds of personal data we collect, what we use it for, and what your choices are about that data.
This policy describes:
While we want as many people as possible to help bring the world together through translation, fact-checking, and collaboration, we have to ask you to not download, register with, or use our services if you do not agree with these policies.
OMG. We are so excited that you’re reading our Privacy Policy, and we think it’s super cool that you’re interested in our work and making the world a better place. We know life before 13 is full of injustices and that you are not as empowered as you should be, but you cannot and must not use our services, create an account, or share personal information with us if you are under 13. If you are the parent or guardian of a child under 13 who you believe has submitted personal information to one of our services, please contact us immediately at pricavy@meedan.com so we can remove the content and delete the account.
We store data on servers around the world. So, your information might reside on a server in another country, and that country might have laws that provide for different levels of data protection. By using our services, you consent to and understand this global transfer of content and data.
The EU General Data Protection Regulation takes effect in 2018. To help protect the data of all of our users, we want this privacy policy to be as clear as possible about which data we collect, what we use it for, and how we store and delete it. We encrypt your account content when stored on our servers, and use OAuth for authentication and HTTPS to encrypt the data between you and our servers. Our log data may be stored indefinitely, however, we take appropriate security precautions to protect the data in those logs. In the event that we experience a data breach, we will follow proper procedures to notify the appropriate authorities, as well as reaching out to you to clarify which data has been gathered and our own steps to address the breach.
We collect information from and about users of our services directly from you when you provide it to us, as well as automatically when you use the services.
When you download, register with, or use our services, we may ask you to provide information that can identify you individually. This includes your name (whether actual or pseudonym), postal address, email address, telephone number, and other personal or professional details which you may provide through our form fields, uploaded files including your CV or other certificates, and any free-form text in your profile description, and any other identifier by which you may be contacted online or offline. We do this to build a community of collaborators, and your credentials may be an important part of that community.
We also collect information that is about you but does not individually identify you. This information includes:
In using our services, you will likely publish or display information on public areas of the Meedan service platforms. Your user contributions are posted and shared with the public and with other Meedan users at your own risk. The public internet can be a complicated place: once you post something, it can be screenshotted, saved, copied, pasted, re-tweeted, memed, or otherwise memorialized by other people on the internet. Plus, one of the most important parts of the Meedan services is the collective production of knowledge. By engaging with other Meedan users through your content input, translations, and verifications, you are contributing to a growing body of knowledge and information. As such, other Meedan users may be entitled to such information you provided even in the event you choose to delete your account.
We may also gather translation, annotation, and communications content, including but not limited to text, images, videos, or audio, you create on the services. It includes the metadata that describes when this content was submitted, people you may have collaborated with on the content, and various other types of data that help us contextualize this content. We will also gather information about the clients, projects, channels, topics, languages, or people whose content you choose to translate.
When you download, access, and use the Meedan internet and mobile services, you are constantly sending information about your use to our servers, called “log data.” A partial listing of these types of data includes:
This kind of data does not contain “content” like what you would post on the Meedan services, and it may be stored indefinitely, though it may also be periodically deleted. Your IP address could potentially be used in conjunction with other data to identify you. We hope you take the time to learn more about this kind of technology – it’s a super interesting and increasingly integrated as part of our online world! But we will collect this kind of information, so if you don’t want us to collect this, you unfortunately cannot use our services.
We are interested in the geographic component of data; one of the exciting things about Meedan’s services is that we’re hoping to geographically tailor some of our translations, for example, to better serve at-risk communities! To this end, we may request that you share precise GPS location for content submitted from mobile devices. We will only collect this specific data if you opt in. Independent of this, we may assign your words, translations, and verifications an approximate geolocation based on your WiFi and IP address information. If you don’t want us collecting approximate geolocation information, you cannot use our services.
A cookie is a small data file transferred to your computer or mobile device. Good cookies can remember and autocomplete your username or enable you to return to a previous screen. Bad cookies follow you around the internet, watch you buy shoes, and sell your shoe size data to the highest bidder who then pummels you with creepy and unwanted products. Life is too short for this, and we try not to use bad cookies in our software and services, but we can’t guarantee that the third party tools we use, such as Google Analytics, don’t use these kinds of cookies.
If you’re concerned about this, we encourage you to do more research into cookies, opt-out mechanisms, and other internet privacy topics on your own, but when you register with or use Meedan services, we may gather information based on cookies. The good cookies are important, and some parts of our services may not work properly if you disable cookies.
Much like our own communities, the Meedan services couldn’t operate without interacting with other services and products, such as, for example, Twitter, Facebook, and Google Analytics. We may ask you for your permission to retrieve some information (such as email address, profile photo, or social graph) from a third party if you integrate with and/or authenticate through another service. When you authenticate through another service, we will never receive nor store your passwords.
If you use such a service, that service will have its own terms and privacy policies, and that service will not be covered by our policies. Additionally, these third parties may use tracking technologies to collect information about you when you use these services or any Meedan apps. The information they collect may be associated with your personal information or they may collect information, including personal information, about your online activities over time and across different websites, apps, and other online services websites. While we will never use your information to target content or advertisements, these third-parties may use this information to target content toward you. Although we wish we could get everyone onboard with our efforts, we do not control these third parties’ tracking technologies or how they may be used.
We collect personally identifying data and information for a few reasons. First and foremost, we collect data to provide you with services! We also may use this data to improve the quality, security, and reliability of our services, respond to your questions and communicating with you about our services, and prevent misuse of our services.
For example, location data can be helpful if there’s a particular translation need in one location, such as during a time of crisis. Personal information like your name and credentials can help establish validity and reliability of your verifications on Check, Bridge or Montage. Specific information collected automatically from your internet or mobile device can help our apps function for you, or help us make decisions about what kinds of platforms to support.
We definitely don’t want to share your data without your permission, and we’re never going to sell your data! However, there may be instances when we have to disclose your data. These include:
It’s important to us that you are as educated as possible about your options when it comes to your data. While we can’t guarantee that any of these will prevent our services from collecting the data we have described, nor will these methods affect our legal rights to collect data in any way, we hope we can give you a little more information to make smart, informed choices on the internet in using our services.
You can review and change your personal information by logging into the Meedan services and visiting your account profile page. We understand that at some point, you may wish to delete your account, and if you request that we delete your account or personal information, we will do so as long as we don’t believe it would violate a law. However, the co-creation of public knowledge is a core element of our services. Because of that, your public-facing inputs into the Meedan services, such as any translations or verifications you provide, will remain on the site. These public-facing inputs may also have been copied or stored by other Meedan users or the general public. If you believe that you are endangered by a contribution you have made to our site, you should contact us immediately, and we will evaluate the situation to determine if takedown is necessary.
We hope you’ve noticed by now that we take your safety and security in using our products very seriously. We are committed to ensuring the integrity and security of your personal information that you share with use when using our services, but we want to be realistic about the vastly complicated, hackable, and significantly flawed digital ecosystem of the Internet at both a systems and governance level. We cannot make your data totally secure. However, we try to do our best to secure your data.
We’ve seen recently and throughout history occasions of sovereign governments (and corporate actors alike), those whose laws and rules we must abide, surveilling, persecuting, and imprisoning people simply for speaking their truth. If you do want to use our services to speak truth to power (and we hope you do!), or even just use lots of Arabic and Chinese keywords that might land you on a government surveillance list, we cannot prevent your data from being collected by those agencies. We hope you take this risk seriously and educate yourself on the risks, but even then, total security is never possible.
Still, some of the security is also up to you – make sure you use a strong, secure password, and don’t share it with others! Be careful posting personal identifying information in our services, as well – data you share and post is publically viewable.
Though we cannot promise security, we have put into place some mechanisms to maintain your data security, to secure your personal information from accidental loss and from unauthorized access, use, alteration, and disclosure. These mechanisms include firewalls, encryption, and defaulting to HTTPS.
We may from time to time change our Privacy Policy. This page will always reflect the most recent version of our policy, and we’ll include a date at the top of the page. If we think the changes are substantial, we’ll try to blog about it or contact you directly, but even if you don’t see the post, your continued use of our services will constitute acceptance of such changes.
Archived versions of this Privacy Policy are kept at: https://github.com/meedan/meedan.com
If you have any questions or comments about this policy, we want to hear from you! We want to build our trust and respect with you, the user, and we are always excited and grateful that you are using our tools to help us make a positive change in the world. You can contact us at privacy@meedan.com.