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Possible privacy violation in one of the major bulletin board systems [link]    12. September 2005
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 our 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.

http://spybot.safer-networking.de/en/index.html

Any thoughts or comments?

This post has been edited by His Shadow on 1st October 2005 19:39

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His Divine Shadow

Got Lexx?

Click to vist FFF.

Don't get me started on Invision Power Services as it is now.

We got this board before the company turned to the Dark Side, luckily, but we can't upgrade to 2.x. Why did the developer leave Ikonboard to start IPS? Apparently, because the company wanted to charge for something he promised would be free. Shame IPS did the exact same thing then, after protesting so much about the IB problems! Now, I've no problem with moving a free product to being a paid product, unless you repeatedly promised it would always be free and built your reputation and standing on it.

So nothing suspicious they get up to nowadays would surprise me, frankly. The company has entirely lost my respect.

I'll tell you this much, though: the board on this site is entirely hosted and maintained by us, and I can guarantee you we don't hold any nasty information about you or pass any on to IPS or anyone else. We've never been an official "customer" of theirs.

This post has been edited by Tiddles on 1st October 2005 20:11

Quote (Tiddles @ 1st October 2005 15:08)

Don't get me started on Invision Power Services as it is now.

We got this board before the company turned to the Dark Side, luckily, but we can't upgrade to 2.x. Why did the developer leave Ikonboard to start IPS? Apparently, because the company wanted to charge for something he promised would be free. Shame IPS did the exact same thing then, after protesting so much about the IB problems! Now, I've no problem with moving a free product to being a paid product, unless you repeatedly promised it would always be free and built your reputation and standing on it.

So nothing suspicious they get up to nowadays would surprise me, frankly. The company has entirely lost my respect.

I'll tell you this much, though: the board on this site is entirely hosted and maintained by us, and I can guarantee you we don't hold any nasty information about you or pass any on to IPS or anyone else. We've never been an official "customer" of theirs.

I heard rumors that those who maintain this company worked on the blaze board awhile ago? Which was a better and more easier to use version of the then old popular infopop service.

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His Divine Shadow

Got Lexx?

Click to vist FFF.