As you may know, last week was our week where the whole team worked to improve the documentation for all of our projects. One of the projects I worked on was fixing an unclear/flippant/incorrect portion of our privacy policy, in particular the exceptions noted near the bottom. This text was fine back in the day when we were smaller, but now it should be more clear and more explicit.
Old version:
Please note: Reasonable exceptions may apply to the above policy, for example to comply with applicable laws. The MetaBrainz server administrators (about five people in all) can of course see any information on the system they want to, but to be honest we’re probably not interested enough to look.
New version:
Please note: Reasonable exceptions may apply to the above policy, for example to comply with applicable laws. Also, members of the MetaBrainz team and other personnel contracted to provide services to MetaBrainz may have access to our infrastructure and could therefore view any information contained therein. However all personnel are contractually bound by non-disclosure clauses which prevent them from making any such information available to others.
The pull request for this change can be found here:
[…] may have access to our infrastructure and could therefore view any information they wanted to.
To
[…] may have access to our infrastructure and could therefore view any information contained therein.
Or something. It’s not said there, but it kind of could give the impression of team members wanting to access all this information. Or at least people might start twisting the words here
At the risk of making myself unpopular: IMHO you can’t prevent anything with a NDA. You can just take legal action for infringements.
We all know what you want to say, I’m just not sure if this really helps to understand, that only friendly people without any bad intention are working for MB.
You’re right, an NDA can’t prevent anything; but we work hard to have trustworthy people on our team and that is our best defense. But, FWIW, this is the way the industry conducts business and how the legal system works. If we stray outside of this and think up something entirely different, then we’d be on even thinner ice.
