Reddit Unveils New Policy to Protect More User Data
All right. Today you announced some a new public content policy related to those A ideals that you’re striking. Short summary of what that is and why? What made it clear that you needed to set these parameters? Sure. So this morning we announced what we call the public content policy, which is it’s a it’s a new policy that sits alongside what a lot of websites have, the privacy policy. So our privacy policy basically says, like, here’s what information on Reddit is private and what we do with it. And so behavioral data, what’s your browsing, where you spend time. And our privacy policy is pretty short. We don’t sell it. We don’t license it. It doesn’t go anywhere. It’s sacred. Now, the public content on Reddit, so most of the content that you see, you know, Reddit is inherently a public platform. Now the situation that we’re in today is different from where we were a year ago, a couple of years ago. And so I looked at it as we have kind of three paths we could take. The first path would be the status quo. We just stay open and permissive. And you know, I think in the past that worked OK. You know, we’d be crawled by Google and others, maybe researchers. Generally, in our view, it made the ecosystem better and healthier. But what’s happening now is we’re being crawled every which way by commercial entities, by foreign nation states for who knows what. And so I don’t think the status quo is an acceptable option, but then the other option would be OK, we just, we just shut our doors. Which is what literally everybody else has done. Everybody else has shut off. But we believe in the open Internet. We like that Reddit content is out there. We like showing up in search. We like that users can find us this way. We love supporting research, We love Internet Archive and things like that. So I think closing off was not the right option either. So now where we are somewhere in the middle, we want to stay open, but we need to do so on terms that are respectful of our users, of their privacy, that are respectful of our business. And so that’s basically what we put out there. As we said, we’re open. We’re open for business. We’ll do commercial agreements, we’ll do non commercial agreements for nonprofits and things like that will support research. But if you’re going to crawl Reddit data, you can’t, for example, reverse engineer our users privacy or excuse me, their identities, or can’t use our data to target them or things like that. There’s some guardrails you need to delete their if they delete it off of Reddit, we want you to delete it out of your systems. And so putting some guardrails on how our public data is used is what we’re doing.