Intend is designed to help you achieve you goals, whatever those may be. However, while Intend or people giving coaching in the context of Intend may give you advice, you remain fully responsible for having goals that are safe, or at least for staying safe while pursuing risky goals. Intend is not responsible if you hurt yourself doing something that you motivated yourself to do using it. Also, if you find yourself becoming so productive that your social life is damaged, you agree that that was an unintended byproduct and that Intend is not responsible for your life becoming unbalanced. (Btw, potential solution to this: make a "Social" or "Community" or "Connection" goal.)
We'll respect your privacy, and won't sell your data or share it to benefit at your expense. You will retain control over what data of yours is shared with others, via the Visibility controls on a per-goal basis. The exact details of this may change in the future, but always in ways that give you more fine-grained control, and if serious changes to this system are made, we will err on the side of caution, as well as notify you. We may do research on anonymized data.
Lots of companies are Out To Get You. That is, their goals are not aligned with your goals, and therefore they're naturally inclined to use your data and their relationship with you in all sorts of ways that may compromise your privacy, security, or your own behavior! Intend is different. We don't have ads. You're the customer, and we're responsible to you. Furthermore, by definition, our goal is to help you achieve your goals! So unlike many other internet companies, we have little incentive to find (or create) loopholes in whatever legalese is written below.
Both the ToS and Privacy Policy below are copied almost verbatim from these Creative Commons Sharealike documents from the folks behind WordPress. If something sounds irrelevant, it's probably leftover from that.
The following terms and conditions govern all use of the Intend.Do website and all content, services, and products available at or through the website, including, but not limited to, the app, blog, life-coaching, and workshops (taken together, the Website). The Website is owned and operated by Intend (“Intend”), unincorporated (but registered in British Columbia, Canada) sole proprietorship of Malcolm McCulloch (who is the person more commonly known as Malcolm Ocean). The Website is offered subject to your acceptance without modification of all of the terms and conditions contained herein and all other operating rules, policies (including, without limitation, Intend’s Privacy Policy, below) and procedures that may be published from time to time on this Site by Intend (collectively, the “Agreement”).
By accessing or using any part of the web site, you agree to become bound by the terms and conditions of this agreement. If you do not agree to all the terms and conditions of this agreement, then you may not access the Website or use any services. If these terms and conditions are considered an offer by Intend, acceptance is expressly limited to these terms. The Website is available only to individuals who are at least 13 years old.
By submitting Content to Intend marked as visible to anyone, you grant Intend a world-wide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, modify, adapt and publish that Content solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting your productivity. If you delete Content, Intend will use reasonable efforts to remove it from the Website, but you acknowledge that caching or references to the Content may not be made immediately unavailable.
Without limiting any of those representations or warranties, Intend has the right (though not the obligation) to, in Intend’s sole discretion (i) refuse or remove any content that, in Intend’s reasonable opinion, violates any Intend policy or is in any way harmful or objectionable, or (ii) terminate or deny access to and use of the Website to any individual or entity for any reason, in Intend’s sole discretion. Intend will have no obligation to provide a refund of any amounts previously paid.
As stated at the top of this page, Intend is not Out To Get You. Unlike free services that make their money from selling your attention to advertisers, we're on your team. So in addition to doing our best to follow the letter of this policy and laws like the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), we're also naturally incentivized to follow the spirit of it as well.
Having said that, we still need to have an official policy, which, like the Terms of Service above, is adapted from the one used by Automattic (WordPress.com). Without further ado...
This Privacy Policy applies to information that we collect about you when you use our website (intend.do) or other products and services that are available on or through our websites (eg Intend New Tab Page chrome extension)
Throughout this Privacy Policy we’ll refer to our website, mobile applications and other products and services collectively as “Services.”
Below we explain how we collect, use, and share information about you, along with the choices that you have with respect to that information.
This is adapted from Automattic's Privacy Policy, so it's necessarily also available under a Creative Commons Sharealike license. You can grab a copy of the original Privacy Policy and other legal documents on Github. You’re more than welcome to copy it, adapt it, and repurpose it for your own use. Just make sure to revise the language so that your policy reflects your actual practices. Also, if you do use the policy, give them a shout-out! (You can give us a shout-out too if you want.)
We only collect information about you if we have a reason to do so–for example, to provide our Services, to communicate with you, or to make our Services better.
We collect information in three ways: if and when you provide information to us, automatically through operating our Services, and from outside sources. Let’s go over the information that we collect.
It’s probably no surprise that we collect information that you provide to us. The amount and type of information depends on the context and how we use the information. Here are some examples:
We also collect some information automatically:
We may also get information about you from other sources. For example, if you create or log into your Intend.Do account through another service (like Google, although we haven't made that possible yet) or if you connect your website or account to an integration partner (like Beeminder or WorkFlowy), we will receive information from that service via the authorization procedures used by that service. The information we receive depends on which services you authorize and any options that are available.
We store a minimal amount of such information—for WorkFlowy, this is just your email and sessionid; for Beeminder, it's only the access token and names of Beeminder goals that you are sending data to from Intend. The rest is processed as-needed and then forgotten immediately.
We may also get information, such as a mailing address, from third party services about individuals who are not yet our users (…but we hope will be!), which we may use, for example, for marketing and advertising purposes like postcards and other mailers advertising our services. (This was in Automattic's policy; we haven't ever done this and don't have plans to, but we're leaving it in in case a really good opportunity like this occurs.)
We use information about you as mentioned above and for the purposes listed below:
A note here for those in the European Union about our legal grounds for processing information about you under EU data protection laws, which is that our use of your information is based on the grounds that:
(1) The use is necessary in order to fulfill our commitments to you under our Terms of Service or other agreements with you or is necessary to administer your account–for example, in order to enable access to our website on your device or charge you for a paid plan; or
(2) The use is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation; or
(3) The use is necessary in order to protect your vital interests or those of another person; or
(4) We have a legitimate interest in using your information–for example, to provide and update our Services, to improve our Services so that we can offer you an even better user experience, to safeguard our Services, to communicate with you, to measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our advertising, and better understand user retention and attrition, to monitor and prevent any problems with our Services, and to personalize your experience; or
(5) You have given us your consent—for example, before we send you onboarding tips and reminders to set your daily intentions.
We do not sell our users’ private personal information.
We share information about you in the limited circumstances spelled out below and with appropriate safeguards on your privacy:
Information that you choose to make public is–you guessed it–disclosed publicly.
This is optional; you can make all of your goals private, or make them public or any-user-visible to share your progress with friends.
Public information may also be indexed by search engines or used by third parties.
Please keep all of this in mind when deciding what you would like to share.
We generally discard information about you when we no longer need the information for the purposes for which we collect and use it–which are described in the section above on How and Why We Use Information–and we are not legally required to continue to keep it.
For example, we keep the web server logs that record information about a visitor to one of Intend’s websites, such as the visitor’s IP address, browser type, and operating system, for approximately 30 days. We retain the logs for this period of time in order to, among other things, analyze traffic to Intend’s websites and investigate issues if something goes wrong on one of our websites.
Another example is our coworking rooms, in which there is both video and chat. Neither the video streams nor the chat history are logged—and the video doesn't even pass through our servers in the first place.
While no online service is 100% secure, we work very hard to protect information about you against unauthorized access, use, alteration, or destruction, and take reasonable measures to do so, such as monitoring our Services for potential vulnerabilities and attacks.
If you authorize some other application to access your Intend account, via the API or a browser extension that can read the data of websites you access, please keep in mind that when you interact with them you may provide information about yourself (or your site visitors) to those third parties. We don’t own or control these third parties and they have their own rules about collection, use and sharing of information, which you should review.
You have several choices available when it comes to information about you:
If you are located in certain countries, including those that fall under the scope of the European General Data Protection Regulation (AKA the “GDPR”), data protection laws give you rights with respect to your personal data, subject to any exemptions provided by the law, including the rights to:
In general, we consider all of our users to have these rights, wherever you're located. You can usually access, correct, or delete your personal data using your account settings and tools that we offer, but if you aren’t able to do that, or you would like to contact us about one of the other rights, contact us.
EU individuals also have the right to make a complaint to a government supervisory authority. We request that for the sake of everybody avoiding unnecessary bureaucratic tangles, contact us directly to see if we can resolve your issue first.
Although most changes are likely to be minor, Intend may change its Privacy Policy from time to time. Intend encourages concerned visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. If we make changes, we will notify you by revising the change log below, and, in some cases, we may provide additional notice (such as adding a statement to our homepage or the Intend.Do Blog, or sending you a notification through email or the app). Your further use of the Services after a change to our Privacy Policy will be subject to the updated policy.
That’s it! Thanks for reading.
Change log:
2014 November 14: Original version is just mutatis mutandis from Beeminder's adaptation of WordPress's generously shared version. Thanks Beeminder and WordPress!
2015 May 24: Privacy Policy updated to better reflect the transition away from a semi-automated life-coaching service (what Intend was originally) to the independent app it is today.
2017 July 30: Minor phrasing changes.
2018 May 24: Updated for GDPR. Thanks again to the folks at Automattic; you saved us hours.