Criteria for Sponsorships

[freddy-m]

The development will be open to all, and suggestions are highly encouraged.

First off let us tackle Privacy Policies:

• It should be a requirement for sponsors not to share users' data unless it is not personally identifiable. (We can make an exception for websites that are using 3rd party privacy-oriented analytics such as GoAccess). We are a project focused on privacy, and if the company wanting to sponsor us seemingly is not, then they should not have a space on our site. If they decide to change their stance on the matter (i.e. remove trackers etc..) then they should be able to be re-added if they so desire.

[dngray]

We should learn from privacytools/privacytools.io#2134

I think we should make this more obvious:

We reserve the right or deny all sponsors from receiving the benefits detailed below if we believe that your organization or product is not aligned with our key values. Therefore, if you are interested in sponsoring our project, please first email [email protected] so we may discuss further.

I have a suspicion some of our sponsors are SEO, backlink ventures. Some of the problems have been when people donated money first with the expectation of a sponsorship without actually even talking to us. The first correspondence being "why haven't they been added yet".

Realistically to someone selling advertising, $500 is chump change. I would not at all be surprised if this is an activity going on.

[freddy-m]

@privacyguides/team we should make requirements for privacy, how old the company is etc..

[Summertime]

IMO don't have sponsors as part of the listing, either clearly marked in the header, clearly marked midpage, or clearly marked in footer

The sponsored listings on the current .io look... not great, or rather really questionable, so avoiding that I think is intrinsic

As an advantage, that would lower the criteria from "Need to be a tool/service worth recommending" to "Just don't be doing shady data stuff or tracking" which would be more practical for funding

[dngray]

IMO don't have sponsors as part of the listing, either clearly marked in the header, clearly marked midpage, or clearly marked in footer

If it happens it would be like the old sponsorship page.

The sponsored listings on the current .io look... not great, or rather really questionable, so avoiding that I think is intrinsic

Indeed.

As an advantage, that would lower the criteria from "Need to be a tool/service worth recommending" to "Just don't be doing shady data stuff or tracking" which would be more practical for funding

We would also definitely reserve the right to refuse a sponsorship. The criteria will require that the product not be privacy invasive, and ethical in its business.

[jonaharagon]

I think we'll probably put sponsorships on hold for the moment. People are still welcome to contribute to us on GitHub or OpenCollective of course, but we'll back off on providing any sort of special benefits like we had before. It lets us focus more on the site and avoids the issues @dngray brought up. It's also less necessary as we aren't hosting public and costly services as we were previously.