Depressing - but so important I’ve highlighted the following quote - says it all about Vertical Scope.
"Another thing you should read about VS. It isn’t a forum platform. It’s a data-collecting agency that uses the forum as a front to generate traffic. Read the privacy policy and user agreements. Once you log in, it has permission to access your memory, HD, browser history, and scan your network for its configuration. You also have zero rights to what you publish as it instantly becomes copyrighted property of VS. Technically, if you cross post something on a VS forum, and then copy and paste it here, you have committed a federal crime. Once you agreed to that checkbox, you also gave up your right to legal recourse. If they want to take legal action against you, you have agreed that you can’t use the courts, you have to use arbitration…. THEIR arbitration to settle. Clicking a checkbox on VS more or less signs away every right you have pertaining to your activity on that site.
It’s a money and data farm. You log in, it scans your everythings, and populates the page with ad banners which make them money. Then later they take the data they’ve collected and sell it. The average human generates something like $23 worth of saleable data every day. They’re not offering you a forum, they’re letting you offer up your data for sale.
It should be noted that many forums do this, just not as purposefully as VS does. Back in the day, VBulletin caught on to the trick of offering a product (a forum platform) that they could monetize. VS is a from-scratch, ground-up data mining operation that later had the smart idea of making forum platforms as a way to get traffic. In the case of VB, their purpose was to offer a platform and they modestly monetized it. In the case of VS, they wanted to get in the data/ad game and they made a forum as a vehicle to do it."
Perhaps Vertical Scope should print this at the top of all the forums they own. Then those souls who were exercised by GDP issues on another forum might take note.