Online Marketing and Privacy: Ethical Standards at Boxcryptor
“Upload customer lists” is what the automated Google Ads email I get every few months recommends. I’m enticed to use the data to run “more effective, personalized ads”. From the perspective of someone whose job it is to do successful online marketing, that sounds tempting. I wouldn’t dream of giving our customer list, our most sacred piece of data, to another company — certainly not one known for its hunger for data: Google.
Today, I’d like to give an insight into my everyday life as a marketing manager at Boxcryptor and explain what we mean by the term ”ethical marketing”.
Table of Contents
What We Don’t Do
It feels weird to describe your job based on things you don’t do. But in this case, that seems to be the best option.
Retargeting: We Do Not Track Our Customers Through the Internet.
Have you ever looked at a product in an online store, and then later had advertising for it constantly displayed? Then you have landed in a retargeting target group. Briefly explained: You are assigned to a profile based on identifiers, such as cookies or device IDs. Websites provide Google and other large advertising networks with spaces into which suitable ads are then inserted—individually for each profile.
Remarketing using customer lists and Google Ads works by matching a company's customer list with the phone numbers and addresses of Google accounts (profiles). If Google finds a match in its accounts, this customer profile is assigned to a specific target group for advertising. You can read the details about this here.
Important to know for Boxcryptor users: Even if the customer matching is possible with the help of encryption and hashes in a data protection compliant way, a transfer of personal data is out of the question for us.
Link Purchase: We Do Not Link for Money
Links are an important currency on the Internet. This is because Google was invented by two students who took the system of scientific citation as a model. Therefore, sources that are often referred to (“linked”) are considered more trustworthy than those that no one recommends. Of course, this is somewhat abbreviated and in fact there are some other important ranking factors. But this knowledge is enough to explain the principle.
Getting links from a website can mean a lot in the online marketing cosmos. And since our website is considered a trusted source, every week many editors try to get a link from us. We refuse all offers (e. g. money, ready-written articles, and exchange links). This is how we ensure that our readers only see content that is factually correct or offers real added value.
Shopping Customer Lists: We Don’t Spy on Anyone
We also receive this email about once a week: "Offer: Buy contact lists of people who use the competition’s products! This advertising measure is intended to poach potential customers in a targeted manner. This works by comparing one’s own product with the competitor’s product - primarily, of course, in areas where one has an advantage.
The idea is not bad, because the potential target group in our case would be people who already pay money for encryption. It would be nice if they gave that money to us instead of the competition.
Conversely, the idea is terrible: how about the iceman following you around the marketplace, touting his chocolate ice cream — even though you’re holding a competitor’s chocolate ice cream at the very same moment? You would probably feel harassed and followed. For us, these are not good conditions to close a deal. Apart from that, we will only contact you if you have given us your express consent to do so.
What We Do
Gender-Appropriate Wording: We Address Everyone
In our native language, German, there are different words for whether a person is male or female. For example, a distinction is made between an “Entwickler” (male developer) and an “Entwicklerin” (female developer). So far, many understand the male form as neutral, which is why it is almost always used. However, there are more and more people for whom it is important to use gender-sensitive wording, so that the female colleague is not referred to as a male developer. We support this change and therefore always try to use the pairing of both forms, male and female, in our German texts.
Cookie Economy: We Leave As Few Traces As Possible in Your Browser
Our website sets cookies from 8 different providers. Among them are ourselves (information about the language in which the website should be displayed) and our cookie banner (information about which cookies you allow and which not). Some of the remaining cookies are set only when you visit certain pages and use, for example, our live chat. If you reject the use of cookies in the cookie banner, you can still use our website with almost all features. About 30 percent of our website visitors make use of this option.
For classification: The British magazine The Sun sets cookies from 64 different providers, and 33 different services learn about your page view at The Guardian.
What You Can Do
We, like any other company, are interested in growing. We want to hire more smart people to further develop our encryption software. And to do that, we need a lot of happy users. The happiest ones find their way to us because they follow a personal recommendation. So just in case you know someone who cares about privacy and IT security as much as you do: best tell them about Boxcryptor.
Refer Boxcryptor to your friends and get one month of Boxcryptor Personal for free – for each successful referral! Best of all, the referred person will also receive a free month. Log in to your Boxcryptor account and copy your personal invitation link under “Referral”.
Know a company that needs cloud encryption? Recommend Boxcryptor and receive a generous reward from us. Here you can find all the information about our program, “Refer Your Boss”.
