Privacy Policy

I understand that Indigenous communities have withstood centuries of colonization. A part of that process has involved the wholesale disrespect and dispossession of Indigenous knowledge related to our sense of purpose and the trust we have with other cultural groups.

Our communities’ research and analysis relationships have left us bitter common and often distrustful of our industry partners and funding stakeholders. Because of this history I want to every potential client to know that I do not access your devices. I do not access your data usage. I do not access your text entry activities. And most importantly, I do not sell your data.

Most app developers either offer advertising space on their apps (such as banners) or sell less less of their users to online, electronic and social media advertising partners. I don’t do either. That’s why my apps are not free. I either find a community organization to pay for app development, find a way to apply research funds to app development or charge for app downloads. All of my apps are self-contained, and do not link to external websites or external apps. To be clear, I do not sell advertising space, contact information or user behavior data. Ever.

That being said here are some additional considerations for app development, security and ownership.

• First, all software keyboard apps for the iOS platform will alert the user during the installation process that the keyboard application will have access to all text that is entered by the user—including keywords. That is a standard requirement for app developers in the iOS environment. However, neither myself nor my team members have access to your device, your text entries or electronic activities.
• Second, all cultural information, including Indigenous language data or linguistic information, always belongs to the speech community that sponsors the project— it never belongs to me, my business or my team.
• Third, all code related to the mechanics, logic’s or behaviors of the app belong to me. If you purchase an app R contents of consulting services to develop an app your Indigenous language input belongs to you, but the underlying code driving the app belongs to me. Succinctly, if you purchase my services you do not get access to the source code, but you always retain ownership of your community’s cultural property.
• Finally, many of our Indigenous speech communities are related to others. This may come in the form of dialect of difference, pidgins or trade languages. You should be aware of the relationships with other people that speak similar languages. Additionally you should also know that any agreement with me does not place restrictions on my ability to work with other clients, nor does it establish legal ownership of materials that other cultural groups or speech communities may use in common.

In summary the last decade has shown me two paramount concepts: Awareness of the distrust Indigenous community members have of Western tools (including mobile technology) prevents or greatly reduces the impact of affective filter‘s, and clear expectations regarding development, maintenance and ownership of Indigenous intellectual property are key in lasting business relationships.

That being said…

When visitors leave comments on our sites/pages/groups we collect the data shown in the comments, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection. An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

Media

If you upload images to our sites/pages/groups, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.

Contact forms

If you leave a comment or provide contact info on our sites/pages/groups we will use that information to contact you. We will not knowingly share, sell or distribute your information. 

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Comments

If you leave a comment on our sites/pages/groups, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

Updates

This Privacy Policy may be updated periodically and without prior notice to you to reflect changes in our information practices or relevant laws. We will indicate at the bottom of the Privacy Policy when it was last updated.

Effective date: 2/15/2021