Mobile phone aletrs and privacy
The purpose of this page is to invite the OOTD active community of uers to participate in debating the issue of privacy regarding the idea to offer advanced alerts to your mobile / cell phone in addition to the original OOTD e-mail reminder feature.
Reminder alerts set to be sent from your OOTD budgeting account to your mobile phone on specific days of the month can be useful for things like important monthly payement reminders. If OOTD is to offer SMS text messaging alerts to mobile phones set in advance by a user from her/his OOTD account for each month to be fired on a given day of the month, then OOTD will have to break away from the premise that all you, the user, are giving out is your e-mail account. With this new feature OOTD will now have to take your mobile phone number and store it in the database along with the alert’s message text and day of the month to send it to you. And even if this phone number is not connected or related to your personal identification such as name or address, which OOTD never takes, some may have reservations about giving out their phone number to a web service, in spite of the fact that OOTD remains committed to never give out any information received from its users.
Another point to consider for this debate is the simple fact that if we are to develop, implement and offer this extra option to set alerts to your mobile phone, then it really is just an option sitting there for those who wish to use it. Anyone not comfortable giving out her/his phone number can just igonore this option and never use it, thus ensuring that his/her phone number never enters the OOTD system, because you only give your number out when setting your advanced alerts.
Currently what we have done was to build what we call an Experimental Project Page for this feature to allow interested participants with mobile phones to help us test the technical implementation of this feature for as many mobile phone service carriers as we can find globally. At this stage the test page does not take and store your phone number, so it is lost as soon as the message was sent, and we do not have it or know about it, nor does the system. The message for this testing is sent immediately as there is no storage for later sending. All we want to know at this stage is how many global carriers we can test successfully. As a result of our testing with users and as we go along, we will post a table that lists the results of our testing so that everyone can see which carriers were already tested successfully and which were not tested as yet or failed the test. To get to this testing page look for the Advanced Alerts beta link on the standard reminder page accessible from your functional link on the right hand side of the main budgeting page (must be logged in to your OOTD budgeting account).
As an active OOTD budgeting account holder we value your opinion here regarding privacy as well as your voice for or against this feature as we are sure others in the community may be interested in this debate. To participate and offer your perspective and preference, simply add your comment to this thread below here, and feel free to come back and converse more with others if you find more to say.
Shony
