This looks really great, congrats! Forgive me if I missed something, but I was wondering if you could clear up some confusion. From the terms: "Subject to the Biometric Data Agreement, you hereby grant to us a fully paid, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, non-exclusive and fully sublicensable right (including any moral rights) and license to use, license, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform, and publicly display Your Voice, Digital Voice..."
Just to be clear, the license of the voice/digital voice is revoked upon deletion of the recordings? I understand it is subject to the biometric agreement, but the words perpetual and irrevocable still worried me. Thanks!
Yes! This is what our lawyers suggested to protect ourselves.
We delete all the recordings when you click delete, so we can't recreate the voice anymore. However, this is still necessary in case we share some generated sentences in social media or so (like we're doing on twitter now).
> However, this is still necessary in case we share some generated sentences in social media or so (like we're doing on twitter now).
This is something that you should only do with the permission of the user who provided the voice. You don't need generalized permission to do that for every user, and given the nature of the technology, you shouldn't ask for such permission.
> This is what our lawyers suggested to protect ourselves.
Generally speaking, a lawyer's advice is going to be optimized for maximum protection in possibly unforeseeable circumstances, not for what might actually be needed or even reasonable to request of every user.
Generally speaking, companies aren't going to go out of their way to rein in their lawyer. Most people won't even read that fine print, unfortunately.
This is a little frustrating. Don’t get me wrong, the site should definitely exist and serves a useful purpose. My criticism comes when I read that they have ~300 employees. They are ranked 1,269 globally on Alexa. Craigslist is ranked 99 globally with only 30 employees. Even more so, on Glassdoor their benefits include “Fully stocked kitchen with everything you can imagine, catered dinners, massages, game room, nap room, open and comfortable work space.” [1]
“The world is kind of in the shitter and Change.org could be the world’s greatest plunger.” Not if it continues being a bloated company focused on recouping their massive expenses.
Definitely, it’s not a perfect comparison — it just seems to me that a company with somewhat low revenue and an altruistic mission should do everything it can to be lean.
Unfortunately that's quite a hard problem. I'm not saying this applies to Change.org as I hardly know it, but cutting corners doesn't necessarily lead to spending less money. Charities in general often have this problem of having to minimise "overhead" to remain in the public's favour, resulting in overqualified people wasting a lot of their time on e.g. simple administrative tasks because that way it doesn't count as overhead.
I mean, the people who have adopted Pokemon Go are now connecting with each other outside in their cities' public spaces, often reconnecting with old friends to go out together. I'm not sure this was intentional on the app designers' part (maybe "go outside" was, but the residual social effects of getting so popular so fast in combination with "go outside" probably wasn't so well-appreciated, since they deployed v. 1.0 as a mostly-egocentric game).
There is the definite potential for a device to change the way we hide behind devices into an opportunity to meet people and connect.
