[Chapter-delegates] make simple things complex again!

[Andrew Sullivan]

Dear colleagues,

I have been noting this conversation with interest.  I have an observation.

On Tue, Jan 16, 2024 at 09:20:29PM +0800, Winthrop Yu via Chapter-delegates wrot>
>... money, reputation ... and privacy -- information on each and every 
>member, the officers of each and every chapter, all emails/messages we 
>may send, anything and everything on the new Fonteva platform is now 
>in Salesforces' hands. Not exactly reassuring, is it?

In the present circumstances on the Internet, it is not unusual to have other entities operate one's services infrastructure.  This is because, like it or not, operating services at scale on the Internet with the reliability and availability that people have come to expect is quite challenging, and requires expertise.  That expertise tends to concentrate in corporations that operate at large scale.  This often worries people, of course, because large-scale operations can mean that such organizations have too great a power advantage over their customers.  Yet, at the same time, without such scale certain things are not feasible.  It is worth remembering that you can rent, by the hour, from AWS today, capabilities that nobody in the world could have afforded to build 10 or 15 years ago.

So, how does one address the privacy and information-handling concerns about large vendors?  With contracts and law.  There are restrictions on what our vendors may do with data we give them, and we are required by various privacy legislation around the world to have data handling agreements with our vendors for any personal information they receive from us.  This is also normal in current operations on the Internet.

It is worth keeping in mind that our previous vendor was not a large operator, and that presented several problems.  Two of them were that they were often not able to accommodate our needs, and that their own data handling was not really up to current best practices.

The selection of Fonteva, which has always run inside Salesfoce, was the result of a rather long and extensive process that included a considerable amount of consultation with the community.  The Internet Society is a complex organization, and the process to select the software came to the decision that Fonteva was the best choice to address the Internet Society's needs.  I have every confidence that the legal and contractual terms that govern our relationship with Fonteva and Salesforce are appropriate and that they protect personal information of Internet Society members.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan, President & CEO, Internet Society
e:sullivan at isoc.org m:+1 416 731 1261
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