Trick or treat

We've had a great first week of opening. The enthusiastic response to our business model, the number of people requesting a login, the behavior of our system. All went really well.

We anticipated we would get questions around three topics: asset classes available, tools and libraries, privacy and security. Guess what? Home run, got questions on all of them.

This post is probably the first one of a long series regarding security. Concerning the other two topics, it is only a matter of aligning priorities of clients to our capacity of development.

Is Algodeal a threat to my intellectual property or is it helping me growing it? What ensures me they are not going to steal it, sell it to third parties or worse? To answer these questions, all the companies which have tried to apply an internet paradigm to a traditional business field had to go through the same process I am.

Let's look at one company facing a massive privacy issue: Google and its Gmail service. Google stores impressive amounts of information related to the private life of millions of people.

Their offering was breaking the classic rich-client software mode; emails are now accessible from anywhere and changing PC is not a nightmare anymore.

How did they made users confident? By communicating a lot on their privacy policy and tools they were putting in place. They had no choice: Google have complete access to Gmail data; there is no way around it. It took some time but users ended up understanding that the tradeoff was in their favor, and that Google would not read or sell their emails.

The vast majority have now adopted the Gmail model and they get the leverage of the proven Google technology.

How does this apply to Algodeal? Well, I went to talk to my tech team telling them I had a lot of pressure from users regarding privacy and having the code source posted to our servers.

The answer came back very swiftly. I was told that, whatever the format used to transfer the strategy to our system, there was always a way to decompile/crack the strategy. Sending strategies inside DLLs or encrypted libraries would not bring us much. Reality is, the strategies are on our servers and we have to defend our strict privacy policies:

• When you use Algodeal services, we make good faith efforts to provide you with access to your strategies and personal data and either to correct data or strategies if it is inaccurate or for deletion purposes.
• Algodeal runs posted strategies against historical data sets and creates performance reports, such as the scorecard.
• Algodeal may contact you in order to enter into an agreement allowing Algodeal to use your strategy.
• Alogdeal will not sell, rent or otherwise share your personal information with any third parties except in the limited circumstances such as when we believe we are required to do so by law.
• Algodeal requires opt-in consent from clients to access their strategies in order for Algodeal employees to operate, develop or improve our services. These individuals are bound by confidentiality obligations and may be subject to discipline, including termination and criminal prosecution, if they fail to meet these obligations.
• If Algodeal becomes involved in a merger, acquisition, or any form of sale of some or all of its assets, the buying or newly formed entity will be bound to maintain the privacy policy rules of Algodeal.

How many of you have a Gmail account? Well, those who do should be able to understand the trade-off between posting source code of a strategy to Algodeal and leveraging the platform investment capability.

Don't have an Algodeal account yet? Get one here.

Benjamin Filippi
Managing Director