Privacy

We take user privacy very seriously.

Mash Maker tries to avoid centrally collecting private information about users. This is for legal, practical, and moral reasons. It is legally dubious to collect private information, it would not be practical for us to send such a large volume of information to the server, and it would be immoral for us to invade the privacy of our users.

Overview

The Mash Maker client is able to observe a lot of private information, such as the content of pages the user looks at, their current location, and their browsing history. However this information is kept within the client and not sent to any central server. This does not restrict our ability to use this information to help the user, since all smarts are on the client anyway, but it does help preserve user privacy.

What Mash Maker sends to the Server

In order to understand the meaning of web sites and available mashups, the Mash Maker client needs to send some requests to the server. The Mash Maker client communicates with the server in the following ways:

• When Mash Maker starts up, it requests the user's profile, their voting history, and the complete list of available widgets
• When the user first navigates to a particular domain (e.g. google.com) the client anonymously requests information about the entire domain
• When the user applies an existing mashup, or creates a new mashup, the client adds this information to the user's profile, so that the user can easily access the same mashup in the future from another device

What Mash Maker stores on its Server

Mash Maker stores the following on its server:

• Extractors submitted by users
• Mashups submitted by users
• Widgets submitted by users
• Votes submitted by users

Precautions we Take

We try as much as possible to do this in a way that preserves privacy. In particular:

• We only request information about an entire domain (e.g. google.com) rather than telling Mash Maker what particular web page is being looked at
• All such requests are made anonymously, so Mash Maker does not know which user made the request
• We do not log what requests are made about domains
• We only store information about a user when the user explicitly performs an action within Mash Maker
• Information about what mashups a user has applied are only shared with that user. They are not made available to other users, and we will not look at that information ourselves

Disabling Mash Maker

If you are concerned that this is not sufficient for your most private browsing, then you can disable Mash Maker by clicking on the logo on the left of the toolbar.