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GoFundMe has been known to help so many people with their fundraising efforts. I think almost all of us can think of an instance where someone we know was raising money for something. We may have contributed to GoFundMe once or twice, but since 2017 when they dropped their 5% platform fee, it always left me wondering how they make their money in the end. This made me want to dive into their privacy policy to see what I could find.
Starting off in their disclosure statement, they say that “user information may be part of transferred assets” if GoFundMe would sell/buy businesses or assets. I never want my information to be labeled or identified as a business asset because it’s not. My information is my asset, not GoFundMe’s.
This paragraph states that GoFundMe provides access to or shares your information with companies so that these companies can perform services for GoFundMe. I know this isn’t entirely uncommon, but when I give my information to GoFundMe, I don’t expect them to go off and share it with others. I tried to dig for a list of these companies, but couldn’t find a full and complete list.
This next section says that if you provide them unsolicited information, you are granting them an “irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, worldwide license to use, modify, prepare derivative works, publish, distribute and sublicense the Unsolicited Information”. That is kinda messed up—knowing that if you reach out to them with an idea, they could simply take it and run without giving you credit or compensation!
Finally, they do indicate that you can access all the information they currently have on you upon request. If I were to hazard a guess, it would likely be time-consuming and expensive to do this, and it appears that they don’t make revoking your consent any easier.
All in all, I think GoFundMe lacks transparency and they make their privacy policy difficult to read for most people. They don’t include anything about revoking consent and it seems to me that they don’t make deleting your information from their databases an easy feat. I’ve read better and worse privacy policies, but I think GoFundMe has some room to improve.
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