Sign the Pledge: No Tips for GoFundMe!

The pledge to withhold all tips from GoFundMe reads:

I am promising to set the tip amount to 0% for every donation made through GoFundMe until GoFundMe provides explicit answers about privacy protections on its platform. I am also pledging to tell my community to set the tip amount to 0% for all donations made through GoFundMe.

Many people, particularly those from vulnerable communities such as immigrants, abortion seekers, and families affected by natural disasters, are increasingly reliant on GoFundMe to find financial support. If there is even a chance that their vulnerabilities are being exploited, the implications are terrifying. 

That chance is extremely real now because of two main factors: 1) the increasingly dangerous and surveillance-heavy environment that we are living in, and 2) leaked evidence from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contractor ShadowDragon claiming that it's scraping massive amounts of data from GoFundMe.

Users deserve explicit clarity from GoFundMe about any third-party data scraping and general privacy protections in light of these concerns. Until we get that clarity, my tip will remain at 0%.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) continues to relentlessly raid communities across the country--wreaking havoc on families, communities, and entire cities. Part of the agency’s success? Using online mass surveillance tools at a scale we’ve never seen before. One of those tools is called SocialNet and is owned by the surveillance company and ICE contractor ShadowDragon.

SocialNet claims to be scraping data from hundreds of websites many people use daily, including Reddit, Etsy, Strava, and, perhaps most notably, GoFundMe.

ShadowDragon is either telling the truth about scraping GoFundMe data and putting users’ lives at risk or they’re bluffing. Either way, we deserve a response NOW from GoFundMe--a company literally profiting from our pain. 

That’s right. They don’t make it obvious, but GoFundMe charges a 2.9% fee plus 30 cents from every single donation. That means for a $1,000 donation, GoFundMe receives $29.30 and the person in need gets $970.70.

On top of that charge, GoFundMe has the audacity to set a default tip on every donation, which is usually a whopping 15% but for some users can be as high as 20% (!). The tip is technically optional, but the user has to manually opt out, creating barriers for users that almost certainly add more money to GoFundMe’s coffers. 

Well, not anymore.