Why Our Customers Own Their Data
Everyone loves useful insights and benchmarks. They give us ideas, help us understand whether we're performing better or worse than average. But insights aren't free—they cost the privacy of everyone who contributed data, even anonymous data.
Sometimes the trade makes sense, and contributing data gives you access to opportunities or insights you would otherwise miss. You might choose to answer a survey about your company's productivity, in exchange for the final report on industry productivity. To receive a loan, you agree to contribute detailed financial data and let it be used to create algorithms and software that judge your creditworthiness.
(And I admit I look forward to Spotify Unwrapped every year.)
But it’s different when you need someone to manage your proprietary business data. At Reason Automation we’re trusted to access and handle that data as a function of our job. Earning that trust means holding ourselves to a higher standard.
That’s why we let customers retain ownership and control of their data.
When you let us manage your Amazon data, you don’t have to worry that we’ll create Amazon business strategies or release a benchmarking report based on your data. The data is yours—we’re just helping you manage it for a while.
Our Terms of Service are unusual—unlike most companies we chose to protect our customers’ rights in addition to our own. We care whether you think we handle your data responsibly and ethically, so we proactively affirm your data ownership and limit our rights:
Reason shall not, without express consent of Customer: (a) access, download, retain, copy, reproduce, create combinations or compilations of the Customer Data; (b) sell, rent, market, sublicense, transfer, disclose, use, share, grant any rights in, or provide access to any Customer Data in any form to third parties; (c) make derivative works of any Customer Data, including in reports, analytics, or other documents; (d) provide, process, transmit, or store any Customer Data in an unsecured form; (e) delete or modify any individual data elements or values within the Customer Data or otherwise aggregate the Customer Data with third-party data in a manner that is not permitted under this agreement; (f) disclose the Customer Data to any third party in a manner that would readily identify the methods, techniques, expenditures, scope, or scale of the Customer Data; and (g) take any other action that would affect or interfere with Customer’s ownership or other proprietary rights in and to the Customer Data.
In plain English: we can’t use or sell your data.
We can’t build things with it.
We can’t share it with anyone.
It’s yours.
PUTTING WORDS INTO ACTION
Our philosophy on data ownership is reflected in the extra steps we take to manage data responsibly and securely. This means balancing freedom (so you have quick access to your data) with responsible controls and stewardship (so others don’t).
We protect client data ownership with a combination of technology, process, and controls like:
We give you direct access to your data. Many providers lock data in a dashboard or make it difficult to export because they fear it reduces your long-term dependency on their platform. We recognize that change is part of business growth driven by flexible data access.
We host customer data in a secure AWS or Azure database for the life of your subscription. Simple API connectors often dump your data into a Google Sheet that is two clicks away from enabling link sharing.
Customer data, credentials, and other critical information are stored in separate systems, with separately-managed access. This lets us limit customer data access to those who have a legitimate customer need. For example, the CEO cannot log in to customer accounts — I have to ask our customer success team to do it and provide a justification, such as proof of a customer request.
We encourage you to copy data out of Reason's database into your own data warehouse or data lake. We design our tables to make this easier, with a unique ID for each row and record creation/update columns for determining incrementality. We even allow unlimited simultaneous connections to make this process faster and more convenient—at no added cost.
Every day it becomes clearer that Reason’s mission is democratizing data access—and access begins with clear ownership.
Andrew Hamada
CEO & Co-founder