Protecting Privacy While Out And About But Still In Touch

Going somewhere to work for a little while shouldn't mean being at work the whole time

Business travel days tend to be longer than eight hours with inclusion of packing, transportation, settling into unfamiliar places, logistical snags and delays, and also the business stuff. Hopefully things happen in a nice setting, with inspiring accomplishments, but even when that does line up there’s usually some stress and exhaustion from working on the road. My best business trips allow folding in a hike or run or bike ride around the place, a good meal or two, and/or catch-up with some local, non-work friend. Some non-professional enjoyment provides a great boost to working well while traveling.

Humans need space and separation. There are diminishing returns on getting things done over time when always stuck in a particular spot, or engaged in a never-ending activity, or repeating the same sort of interaction within the same group of people. Believing this, and committed to supporting great on-location teamwork, There.App incorporates several themes and features specifically designed to promote enjoyment, reduce stress, and enhance personal privacy.

One of our most notable features is location sharing, in which people can show on the map where they are to selected project teammates during particular times. In conversations with customers and prospects, this consistently stands out as our most unique and compelling functionality. We’re not first to avail such functionality but it’s usually put forward for use within families, among friends, or from dispatch centers. There.App is for use by professionals. When their work is organized around particular places, there can be great value seeing each other’s locations, perhaps to find the executive whose absence holds up start to the meeting for which everyone traveled. But location sharing can spur reluctance by professionals understandably having reservations about integrating personal details into their jobs, even moreso while already dealing with work-travel stress.

Devoted to broad emphasis on privacy across all There.App Co efforts, we prominently incorporate such features in location sharing. We only avail location as a live lens to the people who are explicitly permitted to view with no further retention of data about where anyone in a project has been. There.App location shares can only be for start-to-end time windows which themselves max out at a week, and location sharing can be instantly paused at multiple levels (either a single share, or all shares within a project, or all shares by the particular user), and we will deliver capability to set black-out times within location sharing (e.g. can share for a few days, but block evening & early mornings within those few days), and there are a few other ideas on which we’ll expand soon. 

Another example of protecting privacy in There.App is our informing users they can go fully incognito while setting up their profiles, and just interact that way with a team from within the app for as long as they need to be part of that team. When projects complete, people can separate without becoming accessible elsewhere. An example of our business practices supporting privacy is that we electively turn off tracking pixels on all of our sales outreach, so we’re not harvesting recipient information like whether or when an email we sent to someone was opened by them (in case you weren't aware, most promotional email you receive incorporates technology to invisibly signal back if you've opened, and, again, we don't).

Protecting privacy is an important part of the There.App pitch. Motivations include responsibility of our uniquely extending to professional collaborators the particular location sharing capability that can be sensitive; how people in on-site collaboration circumstances especially appreciate whatever boundaries can be maintained; and we're also being competitively opportunistic – it's striking how much software is intrusive, exploitative and unworthy of trust. Collaboration oriented software comes from some of the very biggest tech companies which have several times demonstrated reasons that should give people pause about handling of their personal details. Our business strategy is to stand out with devotion to the respect and protection that professionals working on location deserve.