We’ve just updated our Privacy Policy and made a decision on how we want to manage data sensibly and transparently when it comes to our website, marketing strategies, and values.
Read our updated Privacy Policy.
TL;DR
We don’t need to track you. We don’t let outside services track you. We just want to know how many people visit the site, the pages they visit, and whether they found our info useful. We want to Keep It Simple, Stupid for privacy, security, speed, and usability too.
Changes We Have Made
Cookie Banner Removal
Cookie banners are a pain, how many people actually read them before clicking?
Thankfully browsers are finally catching up and at the end of this year Chrome will finally block third-party cookies by default. On this site, we tried a cookie consent banner which allowed us to use YouTube embeds and SalesIQ (when consent was given). It just didn’t sit right though. We already used Matomo cookieless analytics and made a few more changes which allowed us to remove the cookie banner for now.
Legislation is always changing though so we will do our best to stay up to date with GDPR and CCPA as well as monitor cookies on our site.
YouTube Embed vs. Vimeo
We have finally found a good workflow for creating videos, however, YouTube embeds (even from the no-cookie domain) still save cookies without consent. We have changed the video host to Vimeo and added the do not track parameter, so it no longer needs consent before loading.
This means we don’t get much data about how many people have viewed our videos but the main thing is that people get the information and turn to us if they need help. Isn’t that the most important metric? See our post about Website Privacy Issues for more info on how much website statistical data we really need.
Live Chat Removed
We have decided to remove the Zoho SalesIQ live chat/bot integration from our site. We removed it because it required cookie consent before it could load. Live sales and chat in theory sounds like a good idea, but only if real humans are behind it.
AI chatbots have their place but we have yet to meet a person who has enjoyed talking to them on a website. We have decided to keep live chat in the support center where it might actually help someone.
Future Considerations
We are all bombarded with advertising, marketing, and sales messages. Trends come and go such as Google Ads, remarketing, email newsletters, e-books were a big one for a while. This makes it difficult to be heard and can sometimes feel like we’re just adding more noise to the clamor.
We have decided to stick to marketing methods that uphold user privacy and security and build on themselves.
In practice, this means inbound marketing, educational articles, tutorials, courses, and videos on our own sites and LinkedIn as our only social channel.
We may advertise on LinkedIn or other sites, however remarketing and any kind of cold-selling are not our style.
Use of AI
Our content is written by humans but AI is used to spellcheck and help with clarity and translation work when we need content in languages other than English.
Our videos contain AI speech replication for speed, clarity, and quality reasons, but video content is also curated and written by humans.
Conclusion
We hope that these changes, despite making it more restrictive to market our platform, will show customers how committed we are to their privacy and to the high standards we hold ourselves and the products we use.
