Sorry, everyone. Our bad.
We’ve received a lot of feedback over the past few days regarding the new Loopt friend-invitation process. Loopt takes privacy and user feedback very seriously, and we are especially sensitive to doing anything that makes our users unhappy.
The Loopt team has been working around the clock to respond to these issues, gather input and improve the Loopt service as quickly as possible. Thanks for letting us know what you do and don’t like.
Yesterday, we started hearing that people were unhappy with the way we sent invites to current Loopt users already in your phonebook. If a user clicked the "Who's on Loopt button", we checked his or her phone book for other Loopt users. The mistake we made was automatically selecting them, so if the user then hit Send, they might inadvertently send more invites than they meant to. We immediately disabled that feature. We don’t store your contact list, and it should go without saying we would never sell it or share it with a third party.
We now have a much better invite process. It’s beginning our testing process now and will be available soon. We’ve included a screenshot so you can see how it works.
With the first option, users can send an invitation text by directly entering the number of someone he/she knows. The second option allows you to see which of your contacts are already on Loopt, on a Loopt-supported carrier, or on a non-Loopt supported carrier. None of the contacts are automatically selected. If the friend is already on Loopt, the application allows you to send a friend request to him/her. The third option simply allows you to view your contact list without any Loopt labels about whether or not they are on Loopt or on a Loopt-supported carrier. As with option two, you select the contacts to whom you want to send text invites.
Finally, many people that don’t want Loopt have written that they’d like to stop receiving invitations to the service from their friends. Loopt itself never initiates an SMS to you, but if you don’t want to get any from your friends either, we’ve made it even easier to let us know you never want another SMS from us—just send STOP to any Loopt-related message you get. As always, you can email us at privacy@loopt.com and we’ll take care of it.
Thank you again for your feedback and please keep it coming. We hope you will continue to use Loopt. And thanks also to the people who write to let us know how much they love the service. For more information about Loopt’s privacy practices, please visit http://www.loopt.com/about/privacy-security. If you have more questions, I’d love to hear them. Please drop me a note at altman@loopt.com .
Sorry again,
Sam
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