Invision Powerboard by Invision Power Services, Inc. is a forum software used by many, according to their own site including huge companies like AMD, Sony, Yahoo!, Sharp, nVidia and others. But going commercial was not the only change - when we recently wanted to buy a license, we found out that the links to their privacy policy and contact page were broken. We tried to contact them about this, requesting information about their privacy policy, but instead of receiving this information, our license was suddenly terminated. And after a more formal way of inquiring about their privacy policy, our account into their Client Area was cancelled as well - again without any explanation by email.

Privacy policy and contact information are now again available from their start page, but the Client Area, where this information is most important, still includes invalid links.

From the valid link, I found the sentence "You can access all your personally identifiable information that we collect online and maintain by emailing our privacy department our otherwise contacting our company.". This part of their own privacy policy they already violated when we did request our information. I wonder what other parts of their privacy policy they are violating? The email address mentioned in their privacy policy is broken and all mails are being bounced. Seeing the list of existing clients, I wonder if all these clients have actually agreed to have their name posted as a customer of Invision Power Services, Inc., or if this is just another violation of their privacy policy. We're investigating this with the mentioned clients.

An official statement from IPS I requested did neither answer the question why the privacy policy link and privacy policy email address are broken. The explanation why our account was deleted and license terminated was that they did not like the tone of our fourth mail requesting assistance with their broken privacy policy and the license. The request for access to the stored information was denied because the information was said to be completely deleted, while at the same time the email referenced to parts of that information that are obviously still stored (update: on 13th we received another mail from a person that didn't even know our account was cancelled, regarding our account - so obviously by far not all data was deleted as said).

From our standpoint, we can only strongly recommend against using the board software from this company (at least on new systems) until privacy matters have been improved at IPS, Inc.