Over the coming weeks, OneSignal will fully discontinue sharing any data with third parties.
Over the years, OneSignal has supported scaling our free service for hundreds of thousands of developers by sharing anonymized data with advertisers and research companies, as we explained in our FAQs and help center, and pursuant to the terms of our terms of service and privacy policy.
This data was collected from customers using OneSignal’s free plan. No data from our paid customers was shared. This was a trade-off we offered to all our users as a way to build and support an industry-leading software service.
Earlier this year, we decided to discontinue this practice. On June 19, we informed all companies we share data with about our plan to terminate our agreements with them and provided a wind-down window in order to meet contractual requirements and help them transition. This wind-down period ends in 8 weeks, after which, OneSignal will no longer sell any data to any third parties.
We’ve always approached the data side of our business carefully, ensuring we were meeting legal requirements and adhering to industry best practices. This included making sure that we did not transfer personally identifiable information, restricting the transfer of EU data, providing standard opt-out mechanisms, and requiring customers to get the necessary consent from their users.
Over time, the effort required to maintain our data business has become an increasing distraction. At the same time, we’ve heard a desire from our customers for us to have a more privacy-centric approach. We came to the conclusion that we should spend our time investing in the best platform for developers and marketers to message their users -- instead of managing data contracts.
The time was right for us to wind down this part of our business and focus our efforts even more towards providing a great product for our free and paid customers. Today, the vast majority of our revenue comes from customers who pay for OneSignal’s paid plans.
OneSignal will still use data internally to help our customers send notifications that arrive at the ideal time, avoid annoying users with unnecessary notifications, get industry benchmarks on engagement, and to get deeper insights into what messages are most effective. However, this underlying data will not be shared with other parties.
We started OneSignal after being a small game studio and struggling to find a great service for Push Notifications. Since the beginning, we knew we wanted to provide a service that was free to get started with, would scale affordably, and that developers like ourselves could put their trust into. We continue to be committed to offering all of these things to our community.
OneSignal will continue to provide a great service for both free and paid clients. Our goal is to always be the best Free service, while also providing valuable paid features for developers and businesses of all sizes seeking to maximize the effectiveness of their messages.
