n.V6-3.03 | What We Refuse To Know
01| We could know much more about our users than we do. The platform sits in the middle of their working lives. Location, timing, contacts, transactions, hesitations, the pattern of what someone opens at two in the morning. All of it is technically within reach.
02| Three rules close most of it off.
03| We do not track people. Data comes from work done on the platform and from surveys people choose to answer. Not from following them around. The distinction is between recording what someone did with us and recording who someone is.
04| We do not sell it. Not to advertisers, not to data brokers, not to governments shopping for a list. We do share it with academics affiliated with us, under terms, because they make the platform better and because findings about what works in poor neighbourhoods belong in the open. Sharing with researchers who publish is the opposite of selling to buyers who don't.
05| We pay for it. The Maveriqs' collective experience is worth something, and the party generating it is the party living in the barrio. Paying is the cleanest way to say the data is theirs and we are licensing it, not harvesting it.
06| Why the rules are strict here specifically. Our users are people whose data can be used against them — by a landlord, an employer, a creditor, an agency, sometimes a neighbour. For a middle-class user, a data breach is an inconvenience. Here it can be a job, a lease, or a person's safety. The correct posture is to hold as little as possible: collect for a stated purpose, keep it for a stated time, and when it should be deleted, delete it everywhere including the backups. A deletion that leaves copies in a backup is not a deletion. It is a lie with a timestamp on it.
07| What it costs us. A company that harvests freely would have a bigger dataset than ours, sooner, and cheaper. It would be able to answer questions we cannot answer. Paying for data is a real line in the cost structure, in a business built on low marginal cost. Every one of these rules makes us slower and poorer than the alternative.
08| We take the trade because the alternative destroys the thing that makes the data valuable in the first place. Our advantage is depth, not breadth: intimate detail about how a barrio actually gets rebuilt, given by people who chose to give it. That depth exists only while people trust us with it. One exploitation scandal and the well is closed — not for a quarter, permanently, in a population that already has excellent historical reasons to expect institutions to misuse what they collect.
09| So the privacy rules are not the ethics department restraining the business. They are the business.
