KonyKombatKorvet

I have not seen ads on your website, but are there plans to monetize it in the future?

Notice the complete avoidance of this topic in all answers by u/ChangeAView, but if you read the Privacy Policy on their site you will see:

We may share your data with third party vendors, service providers, contractors or agents who perform services for us or on our behalf and require access to such information to do that work. Examples include: data analysis, payment processing, email delivery, hosting services, customer service and marketing efforts. We may allow selected third parties to use tracking technology on the Site, which will enable them to collect data about how you interact with the Site over time. This information may be used to, among other things, analyze and track data, determine the popularity of certain content and better understand online activity. Unless described in this Policy, we do not share, sell, rent or trade any of your information with third parties for their promotional purposes.

So more or less they hold the rights to sell your data to advertisers, at the end they say they wont share if for promotional purposes unless described in the policy... but the policy describes sharing it for marketing, and "among other things" which frees them up to do whatever they want with your data.

On top of that they are using Shopify as the CMS/platform for the shop portion of their site, Shopify DOES sell customer info to third party advertisers including but not limited to: Google, Facebook, Bing, and SourceKnowledge, specifically for use in targeted advertising.

Yes, but the point is that he is starting his own platform, he has the opportunity to come up with an alternate monetization model that doesn't include selling its users data. At this point it doesn't seem like he is doing that, and he is avoiding questions about monetization which really bothers me when people do that on here. They try to get free advertising on IAMA, then don't answer questions that paint them in a bad light, especially for a company that is trying to push seeing things from all sides and making a decision based on that, they are hiding an important side of the info that would influence my (and many others) decision on whether to use that site or not.

Thank you for responding. I don't mean to come off as abrasive or bitter about the subject, it's just something I see as a very large issue on the internet, and it's not something that will stop without the help of any and all new platforms and services.

Your wording of your plan to monetize is very vague and sounds more like you are hoping to not have to implement ads and selling user data vs. taking a hardline stance on not implementing ads or selling user data. Shopify (even though i hypocritically use it for work) sells user data and transaction history to all the big advertisers, so even if you personally are not trying to sell user data your site already is through your ecommerce platform, and you should make it clear in your legal instead of using wording that sounds like you might not be. There are a lot of great alternatives that give you more control of how your customers data gets shared, woo-commerce for example.

That’s exactly the issue. I have no problem with monetizing your website, but the current common model of your community members private info being a commodity needs to stop.