Tech companies have a habit of making vague assurances when it comes to their users' privacy, and it's easy to understand why. Without detail, it's difficult for customers to hold them accountable.
Privacy is at the heart of BitLaunch, and we want to show you that it isn't just a marketing tool. Since our inception, we've made it one of our primary goals – here follows an overview of how we protect your privacy.
We don't track. Logs are off, analytics are out
Tracking users, whether across the internet or a single site, is far too normalized. It's for this reason that BitLaunch had originally been using a privacy-focused analytics solution that allowed us to anonymize and delete data at will.
Recently, however, we took the additional step of completely removing analytics from our site. As a result, we don't run a single tracker or keep cookies. We think the additional privacy is more important than the benefits it affords us.
Across the site and our VPS servers, we only store the data that is absolutely necessary to keep our service running. We only keep this information for exactly as long as we need it, and we don't share it with anybody else. The data that BitLaunch does store is not personally identifiable, as defined by the EU's landmark GDPR legislation.
That said, we believe it's important to further minimize the data we need to collect. That's why we only require an email address and password to sign up and don't block temporary mailboxes. It's also why we accept payments exclusively in cryptocurrency via our own in-house payment system – this way, we don't need to process your credit card information or pass anything on to a third party.
But you shouldn't take our word for it
In fact, you shouldn't take anybody's word for it. Companies have proven time and time again that they are willing to lie about their data collection and sharing practices.
Maintaining privacy today requires a fundamental shift in how you think about privacy. It's not enough that a service claims they don't log – for true privacy the service must facilitate the use of, and provide tools to secure, delete, and anonymize your own data.
This is a core motivator for BitLaunch's Tor friendly attitude. As well as allowing our users to run their own exit nodes, we enable and encourage connection to our services via Tor. In contrast to many other providers, this means your IP address is still private if we don't keep our word.
Crucially, BitLaunch also lets its customers destroy their server and/or account at any point. We make this as accessible as possible via a simple switch in your control panel.
Building a privacy-focused future
All that said, protecting users' privacy has in many cases required us to build bespoke solutions. Recently, we launched BLPay, a payment solution developed in-house to minimize reliance on third-parties while enabling features like zero-confirmation transactions.
BitLaunch additionally utilizes the latest technologies and techniques to provide the following:
Encrypted data in transit and at rest
Domain-wide HSTS
TLS 1.2+ connections only to maintain security and privacy
A proof of work login system that eliminates the need for Captcha's while preventing brute force attacks
HTTPS Everywhere rules for the Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF's) HTTPS Everywhere plugin
We do all this because we believe that when it comes to privacy, only action matters. BitLaunch is committed to giving its users with the tools to anonymize and protect their data.
As a result, we will continue to update our offerings with the latest privacy solutions and craft our own when those aren't good enough. It's vital to us that user privacy isn't something that slips as we grow. It's a core part of our service that will improve with time and feedback from our customers.