The New Westminster Police Department is encouraging us to sign up for a Nextdoor account.
Nextdoor will not let you join as a resident living in the neighbourhood unless you give them and they verify details such as street address, phone number, etc, which is an invasion of your privacy.
Nextdoor is free to you because your data is the product. Nextdoor is a mechanism for data gathering for investors, so they can sell the data to make revenue from targeted online advertising. In 2017 they reported tens of millions in advertising revenue. By 2019, with $408.2 million in funding and a $2.1 billion valuation, Nextdoor.com operated in 236,000 neighbourhoods globally.
Nextdoor.com describes itself in altruistic terms as “the largest social network for neighbourhoods, enabling local conversations in order to build stronger and safer communities.”
Its website talks a lot about turning “community conversation into clothesline conversations” and sharing helpful information about finding lost dogs, hiring babysitters and getting updates from public agencies. The monetisation vision for Nextdoor.com is to become a hyperlocal commerce platform that connects commerce with the community.
Not surprisingly, Nextdoor.com’s plans includes selling ads that now appear in existing online and paper publications. If Nextdoor is successful here, then we may well see the end of the New Westminster Record.
Nextdoor is in effect a Facebook for neighbourhoods. If you are someone who did not join or removed themselves from Facebook because of privacy and other concerns then I suggest that you steer clear of Nextdoor. I do not think that the city police should be promoting it the way they are doing.
Frank Norman, New Westminster
