[Animats]

From Ditto's "privacy policy":

Ditto uses your personal information in the following instances: ... Deliver direct marketing communications to you regarding our products and services that we may think are of interest to you. ... We share Personal Information with third parties ... Depending on how you use the Site or Services, the following categories of third parties collect data on our behalf or receive Personal Information ... Advertising and marketing partners.[1]

That pretty much says what they're really doing.

[1] https://www.ditto.live/legal/privacy-policy

[bigfish24]

Adam (Ditto cofounder) - thanks for the feedback! I can see how this can create the wrong impression and will follow up with our counsel to improve the language.

To be clear, we are not in the business of selling personal information. We are in the "picks and shovels" business - building great tools for other developers to use. Both myself and cofounder Max are app developers by background and we got into infrastructure software by wanting to simplify app development for ourselves and others. P2P is highly motivating because it enables use-cases that have greater data control and privacy - both of which are deeply important to us.

[Animats]

You wrote your terms, which officially say you are in the business of selling personal information. Informal comments to the contrary have little contractual value.

[jeff_tyrrill]

This interpretation of the terms is straining it almost to the breaking point. The section you quoted says explicitly:

"We do not allow our third-party service providers to use your Personal Information for their own purposes and only permit them to process your Personal Information for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions, unless the data is rendered fully anonymous."

You didn't quote this part.

To me, the most straightforward reading is that Ditto does their own advertising, and targets it to specific users by using third party advertisers (Ditto paying the advertisers to place an ad, not the advertisers paying Ditto for the information), who are contractually bound to only use that information to deliver the ad that Ditto placed and not to use the information for their own future benefit.

The only possible reading I can see where this can be interpreted as selling personal information is the fact that the "Advertising and marketing partners" bullet doesn't use the phrase "service providers", and that thus, the contractual restriction on "service providers" could thereby exempt that bullet. Is this what you are hanging your interpretation on?

(Reason for my interest: I regularly read privacy policies, looking for loopholes; there's a huge range not just in privacy practices but in how clearly they are described. Ditto's could be clearer - perhaps by including an explicit statement that they don't sell personal information, as some do - but Ditto's privacy policy is not what that of a company who sells personal information as part of their business model looks like.)

[Flimm]

Thank you for spending time reading privacy policies. I'm glad someone is looking at them. What keeps you motivated to do this (boring) work?

[jeff_tyrrill]

I'm mostly a software developer but I've long been interested in legal stuff on the side as long as I can remember. Not for career reasons, I just find it interesting. It's not always boring! For a nonprofit I've volunteered for for a long time, I ended up helping a lot with bylaws and policy writing. Reading the terms and policy documents of a company, in addition to learning the actual rules, gives you a glimpse into their culture (granted, a noisy glimpse - may mean nothing more than "founder doesn't give the terms any mindshare so just had their lawyer do everything bog-standard"). Terms/privacy policies are often a factor in products I choose to use (or not use).

[ajsnigrutin]

This is even worse than google/facebook... with them, you're pretty sure they won't sell your data, but only sell your eyes to advertisers... here, they sell bulk, raw data to possibly many third parties.