Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows

Leonard Cohen’s ‘Everybody Knows’ was released in February 1988.

One year later, an Oxford graduate named Tim Berners-Lee, while working at CERN, invented “the Internet”.

At the time, Berners-Lee just wanted to talk to his colleagues from his keyboard, across their computer network.

Berners-Lee’s intentions were noble and straight-forward, but his achievements stand as a definitive case study in unintended consequences. Consequences that have redefined the world and how it now behaves. What’s all this have to do with Leonard Cohen and our Terms & Conditions?

It’s unlikely that Berners-Lee was listening to ‘Everybody Knows’ when he typed those first few HTML missives and he probably wasn’t much thinking about the more dark and deep-seated qualities of the human condition. But in the 30+ years since the birth of this, our Digital Age, like with all inventions, how they are used reflects some of the very worst and very best of human behaviour.

Our Digital Age has become a day-after-day ‘best of times, worst of times’, where we’re all inspired, inured, liberated and entrapped. Where the ‘See-Saw Vernacular’ of opposites just roll and rolls.

‘Big Business’ and myriad shady practices have wrestled away some of our personal liberties and played fast-and-loose with our rights and identities. This rather inert and dull sounding noun, ‘data’, has come to signify some very big and troubling abuses and exploitations.

The dictionary definition for ‘data’ ever-so-slightly eludes to the tip-of-the-iceberg problem.

Data
– noun
facts and statistics collected together for reference or analysis.

Yes, it’s the “for reference or analysis” bit that has been concerning us for a while now. And it’s one of the fire-raging reasons why we invented BLiX. Where from the start, we believed that enough was enough and positive change had to happen. So when we say, your data is your data, it’s absolutely that. It’s not ours. And the brands/companies you share that data with is up to you. The decision yours, the up-side benefits yours.

So we ask you for your email address so we can simply, hopefully, verify that your legit. That you’re a real person. That email address is not shared, passed on to any brand you then put in your Brand Wallet, and it’s certainly not sold on to any other companies. To say, “that’s not how we roll” would be putting it lightly. Your data privacy is fundamentally what we’re about, because we want to you to be able to roll a very different set of dice.

Then there are the questions you may be asked on occasion by brands. Questions like, “What sports are you into? What are your hobbies? How often would you like to hear from us? And with what kind of BLiX messages?” You don’t have to answer any of these, but equally, you might want to, because a brand is asking so that you can receive more relevant and personalised content and incentivises from them. Your responses are then stored by the brand, anonymously, and they are not permitted to share this information with any other company or brand.

Should you delete a brand from your Brand Wallet, the historic messages are stored securely and exclusively on the BLiX server, so that should you reinstate a brand later, your history is not lost. If you delete the BLiX App from your phone all together (a sad day for us, but we know we might not be for everyone), your Wallet profile and information is stored for 6-months, just in case you then have a change of heart and decide your life is that small bit better with having BLiX in it. If 6-months pass, then you will need to (re)download BLiX and start over as a new user to the platform.

And that’s about it. The only ‘data’ that’s shared is shared directly by you, the user, with a specific brand, to make your BLiX experience better. The brands you share with can’t share or sell it on. And the technology on which we built BLiX is as fail-safe and “unhackable” as anything built to date, with tech as used by governments and their secret services. When say “military-grade”, it’s because we’re military grade. Meaning there’s not the same reasons, as Leonard puts it, to “roll with your fingers crossed”.

If there’s something in our Terms & Conditions that doesn’t make sense, or something we’ve forgotten to mention and should have, or if you just want to jam about some of your favourite songs and albums, drop us a line. It’s hello@blix-it.com.

We like to think everybody also knows that there can be a better way, and we’re delighted you’re reading this, and by downloading Blix, that we can find that better way together.

TEAM BLIX
September 2020