GAIA GPS Acquired by Outside

[ifonline]

Well, hot on the heels of the previous email from Jeep announcing a partnership with onX Offroad, I get an email from GAIA GPS announcing changes to the terms and conditions for using the service as a result of the acquisition by Outside.

As you may have heard, Gaia GPS is now a member of the Outside family. As a part of our commitment to your privacy we wanted to let you know that our policies are changing. Our new Terms of Use and Privacy Policy will go into effect on August 1, 2021. We encourage you to take a few minutes to review the policies here:

Terms of Use
Privacy Policy

While the privacy policy may not reflect how we use your data today at Gaia GPS, it reflects the different ways in which Outside uses data across the various brands to better deliver products and services that meet your needs, and introduce you to new brands or services that may be of interest to you.

Here is a summary of what has changed:

• Our terms of use and privacy policy apply across all Outside brands. When you access our websites or services, we will ask you to review the new terms and privacy policy and agree to the new policies.
• We updated the privacy policy with new information about the data that we collect about you, your choices to limit data collection and use, and your privacy rights. Our policy will permit us to combine data that we receive from and about you with data that we may receive from other sources as a way to better offer you customized content, and to provide targeted offers and advertising that may be of interest to you.
• Our new privacy policy also explains how we use and share personal data, including sharing data across the Outside family of brands, and with our service providers to support business, professional, marketing, analytics, and technical functions necessary to help us operate our business and promote our services.
• We updated our terms of use to include the addition of section 10, which provides that most legal disputes relating to your use of Outside websites must be resolved using arbitration on an individual basis.

If you have any questions, or need additional information, please contact [email protected].

Sincerely,
The Gaia GPS Team at Outside

I‘m not sure how I feel about this one because in my experience, acquisitions rarely end well for the user. I guess time will tell.

Sponsored

 

[PocketsEmptied]

• Our policy will permit us to combine data that we receive from and about you with data that we may receive from other sources as a way to better offer you customized content, and to provide targeted offers and advertising that may be of interest to you.
• Our new privacy policy also explains how we use and share personal data, including sharing data across the Outside family of brands, and with our service providers to support business, professional, marketing, analytics, and technical functions necessary to help us operate our business and promote our services.

Don't like those. Allows them to buy data from other sources to build profiles about us and then share them with "service providers", i.e. anybody they chose to sell to. Not that they will do this starting tomorrow, but the generalized language allows them to in the future when the bean counters start looking for more beans. Generally these buyouts and mergers look to monetize data a whole lot more. That being said it's almost impossible these days to buy/subscribe/use any digital service without these types of things happening.

 

[ifonline]

There is also this, taken directly from Outside‘s web site:

But perhaps what excites [CEO of Outside Robin] Thurston the most is how these brands will come together to fortify the powerful value proposition of its membership program, Active Pass. Launched in 2020, the Active Pass program was designed to create a hub for members to receive exclusive access to premium content, education and training, access and discounts on gear and events, and innovative platforms and services to improve access to and quality of people’s active experiences.

To me, this screams price hike and requirement to join Active Pass to use GAIA GPS. I don’t know that for sure, of course, but when I try and follow the link for more information on Active Pass I get met with a warning about an invalid site certificate. Not a good look.

 

[Speed331]

I've been bugging them on facebook and their own forum about the lack of Android Auto and recently received a cryptic 'stay tuned' from their admin. The data sharing might be necessary to get into Google's android Auto platform...

Sponsored