Since everyone has been posting GPDR updates, we should probably say something about it too.
In a nutshell, Roller Network has never collected or used customer’s personal information. We do not require any personal information to set up an account beyond an email address, and we have never monetized any information. We’ve never had any advertising hooks in our systems whatsoever. We do not have any third party affiliates and we do not engage in data sharing. Information required in the account control center to use a specific service is limited to the scope of that service, and anyone can readily add or delete information as they see fit using it. Realistically, we’re a small company and don’t care about “big data” analytics.
On our colocation side of things, because we don’t offer “cloud” hosting services, our systems do not contain customer data. That’s one major benefit of colocation over cloud: your data and your hardware is yours, it’s not subject to the whim of a larger companies’ policies which – and be honest – can’t to be in your favor because they need to track and monetize your usage very closely.
We also don’t have a default contact preference when signing up for an account: an account can’t be created without choosing one of the three contact options. This means we can be 100% sure that everyone’s contact preference was made intentionally. There’s no check or uncheck the box with confusing wording kind of trickery here that other companies engage in so they can share your data with third parties.
Ironically, we do occasionally get complaints about having to pay for services or why our free accounts are slowly going away. This is why: because we don’t have anything except customers paying for services. For anyone who does want their personal data shared and monetized to get “free” services, Roller Network is not the place for that, and we’re not planning on changing that.
What we have done is enabled some cookie warnings since it’s harmless, and annoying at worst. We’re also no longer using Google Analytics on our main website and removed the Facebook integration from the Newspipe. We will continue to use Twitter.