Domestic abuse is a problem as old as humanity, but the last couple of years have been particularly bad for vulnerable people. The first step to recovering from abuse is often, “just get out of there,” and that’s never a simple calculus, but during a pandemic it gets ten times harder.
Several Bay-area organizations have banded together to make things less awful, and now that group is running a fundraiser. It’s a fitness-based endeavor, where participants set a mileage goal. Bikes are welcome, but it’s calibrated for running, so on a bike I can rack up a significant portion of their overall mileage goal.
And you can participate, too! You have two options: Sponsor me or put on miles yourself.
This is a local charity, so if you would rather support people closer to where you live, go for it. But please, please, support someone.
I would actually like to support this charity, but here are some things I would not like:
– to hand my info to yet another website (in this case, likely two) that I don’t know, which is almost certainly (but not definitely) legit, and which might suffer a breach (at this point, I would say it’s likely at t tends to infinity)
– to have to choose to between spending so much time reading the TOS and privacy policy that my donation is effecitively quartered because I could have spent that time earning money to donate, or blindly signing off on being turned into a human centipede.
– having to do a significant amount of data entry for a relatively small donation, or storing a lot of PII in my browser
There must be a better answer. A site where sites’ privacy policies and TOSs are constantly diff’d and reported in an easy-to-read table of what you’re giving away by using the site? A bucket of money I create that can be easily transfered in pieces to charities with minimal friction, that limits my potential losses, be they financial or data, and possibly simplifies tax reporting (like a charitable trust)? Simply offering something like PayPal as a donation method, and/or one person offering to pool all the money and donate? False identities with finances so PII loss is not as big a deal?
In any case, the barrier to entry was too high for this particular cause/channel, but thanks to your prod, I have given a larger donation to a local charity. [They offer PayPal, which I’m not saying is better or worse than other channels, but PayPal will announce TOS changes, it’s a smaller attack surface than “every domain that collects money for charities”, and I have a feeling that in the event of a breach or sale of data — which I consider less likely at a company out of startup mode and that is unlikely to fail or get sold — at least one lawyer will make it painful for them.]
Those are really good points, and while I hope that AtlasGo has their shit together (based on their largeness you would hope so), I have to say that the site feels a bit janky some of the time. But if you were moved to donate to a different local cause, I’m calling that a win.
Your larger point, if I may summarize, is that you are willing to give money to causes promoted by acquaintances, but not personal information. After all, the organization on the receiving end doesn’t need your particulars, they need your money. It’s the people in between who offer a “platform” for raising money that deserve the skeptical side-eye.
I don’t have an answer to that that is any better than what you have already tossed out. The closest thing I know to what you describe is (teeth grind to dust in my mouth) Facebook.