Here’s the sad fact of life today. We all have to be very careful about privacy. Big companies like Google, Amazon, and Meta (Facebook) have built entire profit models based on mining your most secret information. And let’s be honest here — you may think that your actions online are anonymous but they most certainly are not. It’s hard to know who to trust, even if they give you cute little badges at the bottom of their web sites.
Honest talk from an honest company
Signal Group, LLC, the corporate parent of Solid Signal and of this blog, has been an online company since its beginnings 20 years ago. We do everything we can to stay above board. Here are some of the steps we’ve taken to make sure we’ve earned your business.
SSL
Like pretty much every reputable web site, we use an SSL certificate to prove that we are who we say we are. That’s how we earn the “https://” at the beginning of our sites. It’s not incredibly important on sites where you aren’t putting your private information, but every e-commerce site should be taking at least this small step. We certainly are.
Trust badges
OK, so I personally don’t put a lot of stock in “trust badges,” those little graphics at the bottom of web pages. But for what it’s worth, Solid Signal’s little bank of trust badges tells you that our credit card processing is PCI compliant. That’s a system the Payment Card Industry uses to make sure that we’re handling your credit card information as securely as we can. Credit cards numbers aren’t stored where our people can see them, and in most cases our people can’t see your number at all.
Personal information you choose to share
From time to time, our customers give us information like their names, addresses, phone numbers, and e-mails. All this information is stored in encrypted databases protected by Oracle, one of the most serious cybersecurity companies in the world. Plus, our internal policies mean that no one will see your information if they don’t need to.
Personal information you don’t know you’re sharing
This is where a lot of companies trip up. It’s possible for companies to see a lot about you, far more than you know. They may know where you are when you’re ordering. They certainly know what kind of device you’re using, and what its operating system is. The worst offenders use fancy logic to match you up with a “digital persona,” an all-electronic version of you built out of your social posts, e-commerce habits, and payment histories. It’s a pretty shady thing, I agree. But you should know two things: (1) Pretty much every big company you buy from does this, and then they sell that information to the highest bidder (2) Solid Signal doesn’t do this.
We don’t try to build a demographic or psychographic profile that we can use or sell. We don’t try to use other profiles to know who you personally are. Like all companies that advertise online, we use third parties to provide anonymous data on spending habits. When you see our ads online, we’ve asked those companies to deliver people who want to buy our products and services. They tell us they’re delivering those kinds of people. But more importantly we never buy specific personal information. Any information we use is completely anonymized and we can’t see your personal stuff.
We also never sell our customer lists to anyone. Period.
Stealth data gathering
I’m going to come clean here. I put a contact form on a lot of pages on this blog. I’ll put one at the bottom of this article, too, so you know the one I’m talking about. If you look at the HTML code, you’ll see that there are two hidden fields. One identifies the part of our company that this blog belongs to, so that’s completely anonymous. The other identifies this page, the page you’re viewing. This is so people who ask questions get better service. It helps our tech to know what you’re looking at when you put in a question like, “What does this do?” It’s not great customer service for us to have to ask what page you were on.
We never, ever, ever, attempt to pull personal information through hidden fields. As I said, there are two of them on the form, and I just told you what they do.
We want to earn your trust and keep it.
If you have any questions about how Signal Group handles your personal information, call us! Feel free to turn off your Caller ID if you want, otherwise yes we will have that information. It just drops in our laps if you allow it. Or call from someone else’s house, right? Call 888-233-7563 during East Coast business hours. Oh, and here’s that contact form I promised you from before.
