Will Mycroft as a company share aggregate or de-identified information about users with third parties for marketing, advertising, research or similar purposes? Thanks
1 Like
For folks who explicitly opt-in to donate their data ( you can do so at home.mycroft.ai ) we use the data for research ( to improve the accuracy of the wakeword spotter, speech to text engine, etc. ) . For users who don’t explicitly opt-in to have their data shared…no. No, we don’t, we won’t and if we screw that up ( which companies do from time to time as they grow and add people, vendors, etc. ) the screw-up will last only as long as I am unaware of it.
We do use third parties for service ( Wolfram Alpha provides some intelligence for our Q&A skill for example ). In those cases we proxy the queries through our back-end and they are presented to the third party service as a query from Mycroft AI Inc. They have no way to de-anonymize the data unless you as a user provide identifiable information in the actual query.
2 Likes
Hi Guru,
I can assure you that we do not sell your information for any reason, to anyone, even if it has been de-identified and aggregated. We only share data if you have explicitly Opted-in to the Open Dataset via Home.mycroft.ai. This data is then shared with very select third parties like the Mozilla Foundation who use it to better train their DeepSpeech STT Engine.
We don’t currently, but I believe part of the intention for that line in our privacy policy is that we may want to use aggregate data for marketing purposes in the future eg “Join 30k others who are using Mycroft AI”. This may seem like a trivial example but lawyers like to lawyer and I think they err on the side of protecting the organisation.
We have tried to make the privacy policy as clear and simple as we could make it given the detail necessary, and I’m glad that people are actually reading it! Though I wouldn’t expect anything less of the Mycroft Community 
Mozilla have independently validated that we do not share your information with any 3rd parties for what they call “unexpected reasons”. Those being anything that a “normal” person wouldn’t reasonably expect such as those outlined above.
Personally I think more important than a legal document is looking at motivating factors for organisations when it comes to privacy. Apple have a pretty clear reason to keep everything locked down (though their overall lack of openness I think becomes detrimental to their users). Google have a clear reason to sell your data because it’s how they make their money. If Mycroft were to sell your data and claim it was ok because of some technical clause in the privacy policy, it might be legal, but it would be incredibly stupid (and I’d quit immediately). We are here because we care about privacy and open source, and we know that you all are too. Mycroft has been able to grow thanks to the crowd-funding we’ve received, our regular financial supporters, and by providing these products to business and enterprise customers. So another huge thank you to all our backers and supporters!
If anyone has further questions, please feel free to ask away, always happy to talk privacy
2 Likes