User safety and happiness are the most important goals for Oath. Here’s how we do both!
You stay in charge of your data
- All of your personal data is fully encrypted (unreadable by anyone except you and our servers)
- You determine what information to share (privacy controls)
- We will never sell your data (Period. Even if we get bought out, you have the right to delete your account beforehand)
Verified identities stay private information
The backbone of safety on Oath is verifying identities of all users through facial recognition and ID verification. We use the highest level of online security employed by financial institutions and governments to protect your everyday trades!
At the same time, we understand user privacy concerns with tech. We’re also frustrated, reluctant users of big tech companies that take part in sketchy data practices and privacy breaches. At Oath, we treat your data as if it is our own and protect it better than any other tech company out there. We believe user trust and loyalty is our competitive advantage.
Specifically, any personally identifiable information (PII) such as phone numbers, addresses, birth dates, names, IDs, facial scans, social media info, and more are fully encrypted. That means no one besides our servers running the code and you can read your data. Most importantly, this means neither Oath employees nor potential data breach hackers can read your data (the most common privacy risk).
For example, here’s how we store our founder’s personal Instagram Account information on Oath. Notice how everything personal like the username is fully encrypted. Even if you knew his username, you still couldn’t decrypt the data!
On top of that, Oath is built with privacy top of mind while still relaying vital information such as identity verification, photo matching, linked accounts, and more. Let’s use the founder’s Oath profile as an example.
In contrast to most other websites, Oath builds trust with your real identity without giving anything personal away. With Oath, you decide how much information to share whether that’s a blurred picture, initials only display name, locked accounts, or vague location info. To trusted users I intend to trade with, I can automatically share my name, shipping address, and relevant payment account information to speed up the process. To prospective traders, I can show them proof that I’m legitimate without giving them anything personal.
Legally binding Oaths
Oaths are the binding agreements that users can create to protect a transaction. They include all of the details involved like items, quality, price, and more. Oaths are special because they are the same as signing a legal contract displaying the full intention of the trade between two real people.
If something goes wrong, Oaths can be used as a broken contract in a court of law. Plus, because you know the other person’s real identity, they can’t just disappear like most scammers do.
Dispute moderation
The last, arguably most important piece of user safety on Oath is dispute moderation by trading group admins. Whenever trading group collectors run into disputes, the moderators and admins of that trading group can help efficiently resolve the dispute and mark fraudsters’ real identities by reviewing submitted proof.
Admins and moderators do this work already handling user disputes in their trading groups. However, their bans made on fraudulent accounts rarely keep scammers from groups as they create new accounts.
Decisions made by moderators are seen as legal arbitration and upheld in a court of law. Oath will make all of these disputes publicly viewable on involved users’ profiles to keep future traders and groups safe from transacting with fraudsters.
More in-depth information can be found on the features page.
Building products that users want
We listen to what our users want. We focus on feature requests that are broad and applicable to large groups of users, not just individuals.
Any user can join our Discord and directly send in a feature request or report something not working (bug report).
Based on community feedback, we will prioritize these changes and build them as quickly as possible to make our users happy :)