OpenCandy Recommendations and Privacy
Thanks for all the responses we received this week post our funding announcement and related stories. We received a few privacy related questions in regards to how we make our software recommendations. Here is a high level answer which we’ll add to a future FAQ.
1. Each developer in our network hand picks the products they want to recommend. We make our recommendation based off of the pool of products each developer has selected.
2. We determine your country, language setting and operating system to help us target our recommendations. This way we don’t recommend software to you in a language you don’t understand or for an OS you’re not running. Much like a website will report on through whatever web analytics tool they use.
3. We use your past participation to make better recommendations in the future. When you interact with OpenCandy we leave the equivalent of a “cookie” on your system, which is an anonymous identifier. The only data we associate with that cookie is what we’ve recommended to you, and if you chose to download it. That data is stored on our servers, only the cookie is stored locally. This is how our recommendation engine learns and makes better recommendations in the future.
4. We validate the software we’re about to recommend. We don’t want you to receive a recommendation for software you already have, or for a plugin to software that you don’t have. We then perform a validation check with our installer plugin. The validation check uses the registry (like any installer would) to make sure you’re applicable for the recommendation and that you don’t already have it installed. We then tell our servers if a recommendations is “valid” or “invalid”, and we use this only for statistical analysis.
5. We display a software recommendation to you (not spyware, malware or adware – ever). We make a single recommendation to you, which is the best recommendation (as determined by our recommendation engine) that validates in Step 3. This recommendation is always optional (and clearly presented that way) – so you can choose to download it or not.
6. We tell the server what you chose to do. We let the server know if you chose to download or pass on our recommendation. Again, as mentioned in Step 2, we use this data to improve our recommendations so we offer more of what users want, less of what they don’t. If you did choose to download the recommendation, we launch a download manager which facilitates the download and tells you when it’s ready to install. Our servers collect data around this process, such as “download complete”, “install complete”, etc for statistical analysis just like typical web analytics.
If you have any questions, concerns or recommendations you can email me directly at darrius at opencandy dot com.
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UniBomber
