In the Daily Telegraph, we read that Twitter has handed over the account details of some of their users at the request of a California court. This is going to open the floodgates to many legal actions as every offended person out there seeks compensation for some imagined slight.
In this particular case a small group of public servants from the UK, who did not want details of their alleged money wasting revealed in public, went all the way to California to get an American judge to order Twitter to reveal the IPs, email addresses and logs and anything else Twitter stored related to accounts that had sent these whistle blowing messages.
A situation like this cannot occur with Upingme, since we do not store logs that track who posted what and from where. We also do not keep records of what information was in a message, reply or entire account once it is deleted.
For example, a person has a Upingme account, and she has used it to create a flash mob of 10,000 people for whatever reason. Once her task is finished and the flash mob event is successful, when she deletes her account, its gone forever and we do not keep a record of who owned that account, or the messages associated with it.
Lets say that she wants to keep the account open so that old messages can be read once the event is over. If she deletes her mobile number from her account, the only link that could possibly connect her to that account will be gone forever. If she never logs into her account again, no one will be able to find her through us.
No court subpoena or court order can cause data to be un-deleted. If you do not store user data, you keep your users safe. Upingme does not need to keep comprehensive logs in order to provide its service, in fact, they are a technical, legal and financial burden, as well as being a risk to our users in the future.
Our philosophy is simple; don’t ask people to log in when you do not have to. Do not keep a record of anything other than that which is useful to the users of the service. Privacy is the new Rock & Roll.