Transparency is one of our core values, which is after all the definition of trust. As such, we wish to inform of an unintended incident that occurred recently.

The Incident

We first wish to openly apologize for any unintended inconvenience caused to the entire MIT Lebanon Challenge Community (organizing team, mentors, judges and participants) for subscribing their email addresses to our newsletter without their prior consent. This was highlighted to us and we have now taken all necessary corrective measures.

Background

As we considered ourselves as partners of the MIT Lebanon Challenge for promotion & affiliation and in view of the passion and drive of everyone involved to have positive impact on society as a whole, we felt that such future founders & leaders of current & future businesses, social enterprises and NGOs would be interested in receiving our non-intrusive, relevant and value-adding newsletter of our free & trusted platforms (which included mention of MIT Lebanon Challenge as well) and for which anyone can decide to opt-out permanently with ease through the “unsubscribe” button which exists as made mandatory from our reputed delivery partner SendGrid.
Within the Slack platform’s “directory” tab, all participants’ emails were listed publicly to one another. Without harm intended and out of goodwill, with only the email addresses being captured, they were added as subscribers to our newsletter in the spirit of partnership, relevance and collaboration.
We acknowledge our mistake for not asking permission first.

Steps taken by arab.org

As we take such issues very seriously, we have taken the following steps due to the above unintended oversight:
• We have stopped all mass communication from all our services and servers (including all new public subscriptions) on July 30, 2020 and July 31, 2020.
• We have unsubscribed and deleted all 774 line entries permanently.
• We are revising our privacy policies and procedures so that such a single incident does not and can not happen again.

Please rest assured that as part of our privacy policy, we do not share our mailing list with anyone.

In terms of security, hosting and compliance, we continue to work with leaders in their respective fields, and no additional actions are currently required by any of our users as no security risks exists.

We remain committed in providing our visitors and users with the best multi-lingual and accessible experience and we stay dedicated to our vision to empower every person & every organization to do good. As always, and as we continue to add new development and features, we will openly continue to devote all our efforts to upkeep your privacy & security. If you have any questions or require any clarifications, please feel free to contact us.

It is our policy to be open and keep you informed of matters relevant to arab.org and its development and this is why we make sure you – our valued audience – know about this unique incident first.

We thank you for your understanding and continued patronage.

Written by: arab.org
Image: CC
Publication date: July 31, 2020

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