How do you make money?

Better plans to make money in four ways:

1. Ad services — Better receives money for showing third-party ads on the platform.
2. “Pro” Subscriptions — users who do not want to see ads and/or have their data included in data licensing agreements can pay a small subscription fee to exempt themselves from both.
3. Marketplace — users who wish to sell their handle can do so in the marketplace. The company takes a small handling fee from each transaction.
4. Data Licensing — Education, research organisations and third-party analytics companies may, from time to time, wish to analyse posts on the Better platform to provide intelligence on things like inauthentic account analysis, current trends and/or sentiment analysis for topics or brands.

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How do you verify users?

User verification is handled by third-party companies who are experts at verification. We do this for two reasons: security and coverage.

Security

By using third-party verification platforms, we are able to maintain separation from our user accounts and the verification data. This separation means that Better does not hold any information other than a user’s name, email address and mobile number.

Coverage

The companies we use may vary across territories since local laws and capabilities vary.

In the UK, Better uses a non-profit company called, OneID. OneID has built a system that integrates with UK banking apps, so all a user has to do to verify is log into their banking app and click ‘verify’.

In the US, this tool doesn’t work where banking regulations and apps are different so another tool, HumanID, is used instead.

There are verification tools that work well across territories but they are cost-prohibitive for us at the minute. We will look to expand our coverage as soon as possible but in the meantime, we are focusing on the UK and US markets.

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Do I have to use my real name?

No. Users never have to use their real names in any public area. Every user has the ability to use a pseudonym and change it anytime.

However, we actively discourage users from attempting to imitate other people.

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What about my personal safety?

The personal safety of our users is our top concern. It’s the primary reason we require all our user accounts to be verified. We believe that abuse, trolling, cyberbullying, fraud, etc. will all be greatly reduced simply by verifying the identity of our users before allowing them to interact with other users.

At no point will we ever reveal a user’s personal information to anyone other than law enforcement when we are compelled to do so.

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What personal information do you store on your users?

We store the smallest amount of personal information possible in order to run the system and support our security measures, including name, mobile number and email address.

Check our Privacy Policy for a complete list of the information we store.

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