Over the past few months I’ve received a deluge of emails from companies I have worked with, or clicked on their site, or read an article, or posted an update on with their ‘new and improved’ privacy policies and cookie tracking policies with some proactive web-click-through acceptance of their new policy.
This got me thinking that there were a lot more companies out there who have made businesses out of selling my data than I ever thought possible. It also was a good opportunity for me to re-evaluate how we at Capture2 are managing our client’s data.
See first and foremost we believe that our client’s data is our client’s data – it’s not ours. We can’t go using it for marketing purposes, or market intelligence purposes, or to ‘cleanse’ our data store. Your usage of our SaaS solution should not create data that we then sell somewhere.
Let me break that down into a few areas that need to either be disambiguated or are sometimes forgotten in our industry:
- I’ve seen market intelligence companies generate reports and notifications about ‘hot government procurements’ that ‘you need to focus on!’ based on monitoring their own paying client’s usage of their market intelligence system. I’m sorry but this just bothers me – if I am paying someone to provide me data that I am using to create a competitive advantage within my business, the last thing I want my market intelligence provider doing is reaching out to potential competitors and using my interest on a procurement as ammunition to create more competition for me.
At Capture2 we do not use our client’s usage patterns, logins, page views, web logs, or any other client generated data to create marketing and sales collateral.
- I’ve seen a company pay for a FOIA request through a market intelligence firm, get the result, and then the market intelligence firm promptly appends the FOIA deliverable to the business opportunity for everyone to see. Excuse me, but if I am paying for a FOIA request shouldn’t I be the sole beneficiary of that response?
At Capture2 if our clients make a FOIA request we promptly process it on their behalf. When we append the response to a business opportunity it is only visible to the company who paid for and initiated the request.
I can go on with quite a few more examples, but the shortest and most concise version is that at Capture2 we prioritize client data confidentiality, data integrity and fidelity, and data availability as our core goals.
- When we send an update out we want you to know it is accurate and the best possible intel. When you utilize our capture management SaaS system and add in pipeline opportunities you are focused on – no one ever can see them except your designated personnel, not even our employees.
- When you update a document in our proposal collaboration enclave, each document is uniquely encrypted and stored so that only your designated users can access them.
- We host our service in a FedRAMP moderate validated infrastructure to ensure all of the low to mid-level data protections are in place, this lets our clients inherit those NIST SP 800-53 controls into their DFARS and NIST 800-171 compliance statements.
In our Capture2Proposal SaaS Solution your data is yours, not ours. Our job is to be great stewards of that data and protect its confidentiality, integrity, and availability. We don’t turn our client’s usage patterns into our data product – you use our system as a first-class system-of-record for capture and proposal management, not to empower your competitors.
Happy Hunting!
