PRIVACY AND SECURITY = RESPECT

 

The entire team at KEEP SHOOTING is focused on respecting our customers privacy and security.  This focus on privacy and security includes our existing customers who have made one or more purchases from our website and our future customers who have been enjoying browsing our website.  For our existing customers, we have earned your trust and consider you putting your trust in our company to be the ultimate measure of our success.  To our potential customers who haven't made a purchase, we hope you will enjoy reading this article to learn the steps we've taken to protect your privacy and security and you consider placing your trust in our company by placing your first order.  Our focus on protecting your privacy and security is one of the many ways we show how much we respect our customers.

 

HOW WE PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY AND SECURITY

 

In the early days of e-commerce it was sufficient to simply ensure you were accessing a website that was protected by an SSL certificate.  That era is long gone, where you now need to ensure that the website you are using does not use any third-party applications that are run by outsourced companies. KEEP SHOOTING rejects the use of any and all third-party applications on our website, as our customers data and order experience is our #1 concern and we refuse to outsource this vital function to any party outside of our control.  This ensures that our commitment to our customers to protect their privacy and security remains 100% in our control and we do not need to rely on "assurances" from any third-party as to data protection methods they employ when delivering their out-sourced service.

 

Every system we use to process orders, communicate with customers, send emails and more is privately owned, maintained, and operated from our datacenter at our corporate headquarters in Pennsylvania.  We do not oursource any application to a third-party that would put your browsing or purchase data in the hands of a company you did not choose to do business with. Our company budget allocates significant funding to maintain this infrastructure in-house and we will never outsource any of these functions to "save money" at the expense of potentially violating the privacy of our customers.

 

WHAT ARE THIRD-PARTY APPLICATIONS?

 

Third-party applications are bits of code that are used on websites to collect data, inject data, or render data on the page that you are browsing. Some examples of third-party applications are companies that provide product review functions for e-commerce sites, website analytics software, or even websites that offer you the ability to login to their site using your FaceBook, Apple, or Google account.   While these third-party applications allow for a more feature-rich experience for customers and allow companies to collect tremendous amounts of data about people browsing and purchasing on their site, by using third-party outsourced applications all of this data is in the hands of the application provider.

WHY WE REJECT THIRD-PARTY APPLICATIONS

 

We reject the use of third-party applications for many reasons, but first and foremost is our customers privacy and security is too important to risk for any reason.  While third-party application providers may be run professionally, with strict data privacy standards, our feeling is why take an unnecessary risk with our companies most important asset -- our customers?  From the first activation of any third-party application, companies give up control of their data and no matter how much in increased sales this may bring, we feel it is the worst possible choice for our company because it has the potential to harm our customers.   When we need to add a new function to our website, we will follow our leaderships directive and build any enhancements internally to ensure we maintain 100% control over our customers privacy and security.

 

HOW TO VERIFY OUR REJECTION OF THIRD-PARTY APPLICATIONS

 

We encourage any and all customers to verify that KEEP SHOOTING does not use any third-party applications on our website.  This is a very easy thing to check using a "Chrome" based web browser, where you can open the developer tools and see all FETCH/XHR requests that are made when loading a page. You will see there are none on KEEP SHOOTING, and we've made some screenshots to show you our website compared to a similar company in our industry.

 

Here is an example of a website selling similar products, opened in Brave using the Inspect/Developer Tools function.  We've censored the company website name and urls from the Fetch/XHR requests as we are not implying anything regarding data privacy and security practices at their company.  We simply want to show how many third party companies are involved when you are browsing a similar website, and the amount of data they are collecting.

 

This FETCH/XHR request is to a company called "Bloomreach" which I'm sure the casual customer of this website has no relationship with, yet they are involved in displaying product data:

 

 

 

 

Here is another Fetch/XHR request on the same product page.  The endpoint that it is accessing is "https://cdn.builder.io/api/v1/track" which based on the name alone would appear to be used to track browsing of individual sessions.  I'm certain few if any people browsing this website know that they are logging activity to a company called "Builder IO" when visiting a website selling Winchester 40S&W ammunition.

 

 

 

Here is a third outsourced third-party application provider on the same webpage, this one is "Turnto" which was recently acquired or changed its name to "Emplifi" which solicits reviews, syndicates reviews, and aggregates data from customers. 

 

 

Looking further into this, you can see that the "Turnto" code appears to be generating unique identifiers for each person browsing.  Is this data shared across Turnto customers?  We do not know, but we would never engage with a company like this where this is even a posibility.  Here is the  Payload of their next request, where you can see they have the websites product SKU and a field called "uid" in the JSON payload:

 

 

 

If you use the same method on KEEP SHOOTING to look for third-party application use, you will see NO Fetch/XHR requests are initiated.  We encourage you to view this on your own at anytime, and you will see we do not use any third-party application provider on our website like the above examples.

 

 

That is what you want to see, a company that does not load, inject, or post data to a third-party resource when you are browsing their webite.  You can trust AND verify that KEEP SHOOTING currently and in the future will NEVER violate the trust you've put into our company to protect your privacy and security.

 

Please note, we are not implying that any third-party application provider is abusing, misusing, or otherwise handling any companies customer data unethically.  We simply refuse to take this risk, while the vast majority of our competitors feel comfortable doing this.