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Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

I assume the competition had finished. Why hadn't this personal data been deleted?

Did competition entrants have to opt in to allow you to use their personal data for marketing? Or was that opt in assumed?

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Competition is still ongoing. It's tied into a larger campaign.

The videos were sent directly to users as part of an email confirmation of their contest entry. We did not use the videos for marketing. It was up to the user to actually share the video.

I think parents question is about if you have consent from your competition users to use their location data as part of marketing campaings as part of the ToS. While from a technical PoV this campaign is awesome, in Europe you might easily get sued for this kind of use of the data, especially since you make it quite obvious how you used the data (v.s. "hidden" data mining, which most companies can get away with).

Yeh, I hear you. Users consented to sharing their location as one of the variables required to enter the contest. It was a ticket giveaway so knowing their location allowed us to figure out which show they might go to. Again, the videos themselves were emailed directly to users and while sharing them publicly was encouraged, it was not something we did ourselves.

It's like... you gave me an email address so naturally I'm going to email you. You gave me a location so (unnaturally) I'm going to make a video for you.

I should also note that the location consent was (in most cases) initiated by the HTML5 Geolocation prompt. Now a lot of companies use this technology to reposition something like a Google Map on their website. We did the same thing but positioned a static map and made it part of a video composition.

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