What we are doing to protect your privacy

At TrueNews global, we understand the importance of keeping private data private and we are dedicated to being transparent regarding the use of your information. In this blog, I’m going to cover some of the steps we’ve taken to protect your private information. 

Before we get into the technical stuff, I want to discuss a few things that make TrueNews different than other platforms.

We Prioritize People

From the very beginning, this project has had a “security-first” focus – it has never been about making money. In fact, we take a firm stance against “Pay-to-Play” models; we don’t believe in allowing some to pay more to have more influence.

As a private company, we do not have to worry about sacrificing security and quality in order to appease investors. Additionally, many companies have an exit strategy – build it up and get out. We have no plan to do this. Though we can’t predict the future, we will do the best thing for the people (our users) who trust us.

Data Viewing Restrictions

The data you give us will never show up on a page after you give it to us (unless it’s part of the function of the product, like showing you how you voted on a News Item before). This is because the ability to retrieve your information and show it to you creates a potential hole in the software that allows access to people with bad intentions. While the software does need to retrieve data about you, it’s not extended out any farther than necessary in the design of the software

For example, on many websites, you have a ‘profile’ page that might contain your name, address, and other info you’ve provided to that company. You’ll never see that info on our web pages. If you want to change the info (say your mailing address), you simply provide us the new info and we store it. The same goes for credit cards and other sensitive information. This in itself reduces the ‘attack surface’ from a security perspective, and makes you safer.

Additionally, those on the team are technology experts, with a lifetime of experience. You wouldn’t believe how complicated software is today, with all the dependencies between components, it’s scary, so we apply good principles to reduce that complexity wherever we can. We believe in zero-trust (it’s a principle that I’ve spouted for decades) in all things, with the goal of reducing risks wherever we can.

Data Administration Restrictions

Go talk to anyone you know who works in information technology, and ask them if their system administrators (the folks who take care of the actual computers and software deployed to those computers) have access to the data on those systems. if they’re honest with you, the answer will be YES.

You would be shocked to know how many people can touch the data in a company, either directly through operational systems, or through copies of data taken for backups, or testing…the list goes on and on. In my experience across 16 different industries and many companies, the story is always the same, way too many people have access to sensitive data.

For TrueNews (and MeUs), the group of people who can access your data is tiny, logging by application is heavily restricted and reviewed, and proper, proactive and reactive controls are in place to only allow authorized use of the data. It’s not simple, but it starts with a simple principle: Protecting the users’ data above all else.

I hope this has given you insight into how we view your privacy. Without your trust, we can’t make any of this work, and I ask you, how many companies do you know that are this honest?

Learn more about our stance on privacy here.