The fundamental choice of personal privacy

Soon after we rolled out FCPA Tracker, we began receiving the same question again and again: Do you provide user activity reports?

Law firms, Fortune 500s, and even some governments, all asked.

We had already decided we wouldn’t provide user activity reports for FCPA Tracker to anyone.

Here’s how we thought about it then and think about it now.

The most important thing between us and our users is trust. We believe it’s our responsibility to protect their privacy — with no middlemen or exceptions.

And we believe the investigations a user views, or what countries, industries, laws firms, or agencies they are researching, is privileged information.

We understand that user activity reports can serve a purpose and may be necessary for other compliance-industry software with different functionality. Activity reports can help measure engagement, return on investment, and other management metrics.

But we believe end user privacy outweighs the utility of management reports.

In the era of Facebook hearings in Congress and the start of GDPR, our decision to honor user privacy may sound like the obvious thing to do. But we’ve received a fair amount of hate mail over it, and we’ve lost some sales opportunities.

But we’ve also heard from end users (some in the same organizations that sent us hate mail) expressing gratitude.

We’re still just as excited about the platform as the day we launched it, and we’re grateful to our users all over the world who trust us to provide accurate and current data about FCPA investigations.

Learn more about FCPA Tracker here.

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Harry Cassin, pictured above, is the managing editor of the FCPA Blog.