I came across this article on Wired that speaks to a privacy bauble that was discovered recently in the Facebook platform. Basically it states that even if a user marked information as private, such as their age or sexual orientation, they would still show up in random searches for those fields through the advanced search. Although Facebook quickly corrected the issue which is a testament to the need to listen to your community, it reminded me of the fact that privacy is something that truly troubles me when thinking of our own platform.

We’re trying to do things a little different over here at SharedReviews. We feel that your profile details are paramount to the product experiences you’ve had when sharing them with other people. Although there’s more comfort in having this info transparent in a face to face sharing medium where you get to choose your audience, doing it online is another thing altogether. This is probably the only reason why no other review site has focused on the profile to the extent we have since it provides so much more value than the effectively anonymous reviews that are available online today.

We went to a lot of trouble to make sure that you’re comfortable sharing pertinent details about yourself by having as much protection around your personal identity as possible. Having a clear break between Identity and Profile was the only way we felt you would feel more comfortable in disclosing as much as you can about yourself so that you’ll be able to earn more revenue and exposure on the reviews you write.

We’ve designed the profile system to allow you to share (or hide) almost every detail in your profile with others in our community. Well, everything except your most intimate contact details. We want ironclad protection so that you feel more comfortable with sharing things like your income, job title, age and/or family details in order for others to garner the necessary context around the experiences you submit for them to read.

As far as the beta is concerned, we’re getting closer and closer to launch every day. Expect an update shortly with our expected launch dates.