A privacy and security pledge

Update - <2022-10-18 Tue> - we just also found out about The Santa Clara Principles - it’s not exactly what we’m thinking about, but it’s interesting as a model and has input from the EFF, ACLU, and The Brennan Center for what it’s worth.

We’m thinking about building a piece of software…more than that actually. Been designing it for a while now and there are certain values we’m trying to bring to the project. Things to do with what we want and feel is right around privacy, data-ownership, security. Values that we want the software we buy and use to hold as well. It got us thinking that we’d like to sign some kind of pledge of user-goodwill on topics like these.

We found the Student Privacy Pledge 2020 and this resembles what we’m looking for “…a voluntary but legally binding industry pledge…”. We want the more broad version that goes beyond just students…and we want it vetted, or even better written, by a substantial data privacy advocate like the EFF.

Draft of something like the following, first from the users’ perspective and then followed by the statements we as a software company will agree to.

We, the user:

want to own our data
want to have a choice in the services where that data gets stored
want to have the option to only store data on our device
want to have any centralized data store with end-to-end encryption
want to know by sight that our data is encrypted in transit (bring green browser locks to mobile apps)
want to be able to sell access to our data and reap some benefit (discounts, pay, other perks)
want to be able to revoke that sale and know our data is destroyed
want to be able to specify the duration from 1 month to 1 year and beyond
want to control the marketplace for our data

We, the software maker agree to the demands above:

Jake Levine, Software Maker of the future