Building Trust Through Transparency
Parler’s Privacy Practices
In Parler’s world of digital communication, user trust is of vital importance and rightly considered an important principle of good, focus-defining privacy policy. In emerging digital environments, such as Parler, privacy is a distinguishing marker used by users to identify services that help them create a safe and trustworthy space online. And so, one of the most apparent things we can say about Parler, today, is that it has an unusually explicit commitment to transparency in its privacy policy as a lawful, politically consistent means to fulfil its contract with users. When comparing the transparency in Parler’s privacy policy to Truth Social, and more clearly to X, which until 2021 was called Twitter, it becomes clear that Parler’s transparency is not just another privacy policy.
Parler believes users have the right to know how their data is used and that privacy policies should be accessible to users, rather than opaque and convoluted in legalese. That commitment to openness translates into Parler’s privacy policies, which are front-and-centre for users to read and by which users are bound at registration, fairly far down the list on their privacy-policy page.
Truth Social and X will likely dance around privacy issues, depending on the public perception of them, while Parler is outwardly candid: it was constantly blogging about its user data practices and what it had done to protect its users’ privacy, becoming a community of people constantly communicating with the company via blog posts. Parler’s open communication became a source of trust between the company and its users, in an era where tech companies were increasingly losing consumer trust as they started to be held to account for their data handling practices.
Parler’s data usage policies are also clear. Users understand how their data is being used. They can opt in or out of features and share or delete their information as they choose. Openness is crucial to Parler. When users know how their data will be used, they feel confident in participating in a digital world. That way, they know the flow of data is ethical, respectful to their privacy, and under their control.
In 2024, when data privacy becomes an important election issue for many users, transparency at Parler – in which the word isn’t merely a ‘buzz’ but is lived – will be the ideological (and profit-driving) outcome of building a platform in which users experience a pre-emptive transparency and thereby again enjoy a trustful, open platform where respect for user privacy is a principled and lasting commitment.
