Are the results and the Briefings and other reports public or private?

The one-sentence answer to the question of what is private vs what is public is that “Everything is private, very much so,”–and there are some important footnotes to that that are important to explore. Let’s dive in.

Let’s start with examining the boildown of the answer: “Everything is private, very much so.” Absolutely. Here are some examples:

• The information (questions, reports, or analyses) is never shared publicly.
• Even in an anonymized, anonymous form–nothing is public or shared.
• Not even the internal team at SpotlessMind can access your answers, Briefings, or reports.
• This high privacy standard applies to your raw answers, as well as your Briefing and other reports and analyses made using your model.
• Even when you request feedback on your Briefing and how you work from colleagues, and they answer questions about you–you can’t even see their answers! We wait until three or more colleagues have responded to questions about you, then mix those suggestions and use the mix to recommend updates to your Briefing- so it makes it impossible, literally, to figure out who said what. So we protect not only your privacy but also that of your colleagues who answer questions about you and leave you feedback.
• We never share nor give your information to anyone; no selling user info in this corner of the Internet.

We ourselves are privacy nerds. You don’t want to know how many of us live using the uMatrix Origin ad blocker (for the win!), the Kagi search engine, VPNs, and your standard arsenal of privacy-preserving tools.

On top of that, one of our deepest principles, not just at SpotlessMind but towards life and existence itself, is treating people how we want to be treated. And we hate this universe in which “you’re the product,” and every bit of info about you is sliced and sold to ad agencies, and so forth. Ugh.

It’s also important to know a few details to understand our level of privacy. Here are the noteworthy points:

First, for the Briefings and other reports, we use a security methodology that “magic link” email logins and password retrieval emails use to give you a new password to confirm your email. For example, it’s called “Security by Obscurity,” and basically, it means that the URL of any report about you is a URL that is effectively impossible for anyone to guess or find. To find a report with a URL like spotlessmind.io/report/adsfaeifmasduifmaiosrgansdkunawefyunvadfdansduaybanusdnaosfn would require literally millions of years of CPU time.

This is why password retrieval and email confirmation methods use the same way.

And it’s worth noting that just like email password retrieval and confirmation links, there is no password protection. So, in the one-on-a-gazillion trillion years that someone randomly types that in, they will be able to find it.

Another detail worth noting is that you can share the link with anyone. And those you send the link to will have access to read the report at that link. If you include it in the footer of your email, everyone you email will see it.

It’s also worth noting that we have it on our dev list to add very granular access controls as a premium feature, so that will happen eventually.

And it is also worth noting that, for Enterprise users, the enterprise admin can create reports about you and other team members, which are equally as private as the above, using the same Security by Obscurity methodology.