[Adium-devl] URGENT: WSJ Adium review

[Colin Barrett]

Hi Katherine,

On Aug 4, 2008, at 9:29 AM, Boehret, Katherine wrote:

> 1.       What types of privacy protection do you offer to guarantee  
> that people can give you their IM username and password without fear  
> of you giving that information to others?

The only place Adium stores usernames or passwords is on your local  
computer, with your passwords encrypted in Apple's Keychain. We do not  
store that information anywhere on our servers, nor do we have plans to.

The only information we collect about our users is a small bit of  
anonymized information about the version of Adium and the  
configuration of their computer (operating system version, amount of  
RAM, etc) for the purpose of deciding which configurations to support  
in the future. We do this in the same way as many other third party  
Mac OS X applications: using a piece of (open source) software called  
Sparkle. Additionally, we make an aggregate of the data we collect  
public for all to see.

> 2.       Is anything other than IMing incorporated into the Adium  
> experience? I know some other services integrate email and social  
> networking, in addition to IM, and wanted to make sure I’m not  
> missing anything.

Adium is focused around IMing, and it is the primary purpose of the  
application. Peter gave a pretty detailed summary of our email  
capabilities. I should note though that until Twitter restores their  
Jabber/XMPP/GTalk gateway, you cannot post to Twitter from Adium. Very  
sad :(

One thing I would like to note that maybe wasn't made 100% clear is  
that Adium is developed by an informal group of unpaid volunteers from  
around the world. We don't have any sort of corporate agenda, no VC  
money, no ulterior motives. Doing anything other than treating our  
users' data with the utmost respect would not benefit us in any way.  
Plus it's a pretty silly thing to do, anyway. :)

I'll email you my phone number off-list. I'll do my best to answer any  
questions you have.

-Colin
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://adium.im/pipermail/devel_adium.im/attachments/20080804/53908cdb/attachment-0001.html>