FYI to anyone / everyone
I was referencing this notice, originally posted on spybot.info under support:
Invision Powerboard by Invision Power Services, Inc.
is a forum software used by many, according to their
own site including huge companies like AMD, Sony,
Yahoo!, Sharp, nVidia and others. But going commercial
was not the only change - when we recently wanted to
buy a license, we found out that the links to their
privacy policy and contact page were broken. We tried
to contact them about this, requesting information
about their privacy policy, but instead of receiving
this information, our license was suddenly terminated.
And after a more formal way of inquiring about their
privacy policy, our account into their Client Area was
cancelled as well - again without any explanation by
email.
Privacy policy and contact information are now again
available from their start page, but the Client Area,
where this information is most important, still
includes invalid links.
From the valid link, I found the sentence "You can
access all your personally identifiable information
that we collect online and maintain by emailing our
privacy department or otherwise contacting our
company.". This part of their own privacy policy they
already violated when we did request our information.
I wonder what other parts of their privacy policy they
are violating? The email address mentioned in their
privacy policy is broken and all mails are being
bounced. Seeing the list of existing clients, I wonder
if all these clients have actually agreed to have
their name posted as a customer of Invision Power
Services, Inc., or if this is just another violation
of their privacy policy. We're investigating this with
the mentioned clients.
An official statement from IPS I requested did neither
answer the question why the privacy policy link and
privacy policy email address are broken. The
explanation why our account was deleted and license
terminated was that they did not like the tone of our
fourth mail requesting assistance with their broken
privacy policy and the license. The request for access
to the stored information was denied because the
information was said to be completely deleted, while
at the same time the email referenced to parts of that
information that are obviously still stored (update:
on 13th we received another mail from a person that
didn't even know our account was cancelled, regarding
our account - so obviously by far not all data was
deleted as said).
From our standpoint, we can only strongly recommend
against using the board software from this company (at
least on new systems) until privacy matters have been
improved at IPS, Inc.
