Update on Pocket Casts and Privacy

Owen Grover, the new post-acquisition CEO of Pocket Casts:

We’re a private and separate company and our privacy policy remains unchanged. We can’t and won’t share any of your personal data with NPR, WNYC, WBEZ or This American Life. They didn’t buy Pocket Casts for that reason.

It’s also worth pointing out that we’ve spent 8 years caring about the kind of data we do and don’t store about you, it’s literally the minimum amount required to run our sync service. If you don’t sign in and leave push notifications off, we literally have no data about you. That’s less than any other podcast platform we know of. If you choose to sign in we have your email address, password and data to sync to other platforms. If you turn on push we store the unique ID Apple gives us so we can send you push notifications. We find it so easy to justify this because every piece of data we store is to provide you with services, not us with your data.

Good to hear.

Concern 4: Pocket Casts will start tracking users [sic] locations.

This one perplexes me, but hey we did say we’d address everything. We don’t need your location data. We don’t want your location data. We won’t be collecting or storing your location data. Where you go day to day is none of our business…I have no idea why people even think we’d do that.

Again, good to hear, but I find it hard to believe Grover is genuinely perplexed by this concern. The reason they’d start tracking location is to serve targeted local ads.

★ Wednesday, 9 May 2018