🚨 IMPORTANT Fundamental & Important Shift · catknows.

🚨 IMPORTANT Fundamental & Important Shift

Yesterday’s meeting was not a regular update.

It was about core technical, legal, and ethical decisions that define how catknows. will work going forward, why this benefits every tester, and why this is the safest and most future-proof solution for everyone involved.

🚨 Please take a moment to read this carefully it’s essential for understanding the next phase of catknows.

🧠 How catknows. Worked Before (Technically)

Previous approach (Admin Method):

We used a catknows. admin account inside your communities
This allowed us to: fetch community data for you store it on our side structure and analyze it and visualize it on cat-knows.com
This worked technically but it came with serious downsides.

⚠️ Why This Approach Was Risky

Two major factors collided here:

1️⃣ Skool’s Legal Framework

According to Skool’s Terms of Service & Acceptable Use Policy:

✅ Community owners may use their own data
❌ Using data commercially is restricted
❌ Large-scale, automated data extraction(bots, scrapers, crawlers, cross-community fetching) is not allowed

➡️ The previous setup lived in a legal gray zone — often tolerated, but never guaranteed or controllable.

2️⃣ EU & Data Protection (especially Germany)

DSGVO / GDPR
Data security & liability
We would have been responsible for: storing sensitive community data securing it legally and technically carrying the full risk

Honestly:

This didn’t feel right to us.

Not legally and not ethically.

💡 The Core Realization

We identified two fundamental problems:

Data collection via the admin method
Data storage on our side

Together, this meant:

potential ToS conflicts
massive legal overhead
and most importantly: risking your trust

And that led us to a simple truth:

The motto should always have been:

“Your Community – Your Data.”

🚀 The New Solution

We rethought everything structurally, not cosmetically.

catknows. will become a

locally installed software

Here’s what that means:

🖥️ Local Installation

You download catknows.
You install it locally on your computer

🌐 Browser Plugin

A lightweight browser plugin runs alongside it
While you’re logged into Skool: you fetch your data yourself directly from your own account with just a click.
You decide: when data is updated in which of your owned communities and how often.

🔐 What This Means for Your Data

📂 All data is stored locally on your machine
🔒 You have full control
❌ We (catknows.) have no access
❌ No storage on our side
❌ No admin account needed

Who should you trust more than yourself?

Data is:

processed locally
stored securely
displayed in the familiar browser dashboard you already know

✅ The Benefits — For Everyone

For You (Users)

Full data ownership
Maximum privacy & security
Legal clarity
Zero dependency
Total transparency

For Us (Builders)

No gray zones
No legal uncertainty
No trust conflicts
Clear role: tool builders, not data holders/provider

🔨 Put Simply

You need to hammer a nail into a wall?👉 Here’s a hammer.
You need to understand who does what, when, how, and with whom in your community?👉 Here’s catknows.

We build the tool.

You own the data.

⏳ Timeline Impact

This decision will cost us roughly ~2 additional weeks of development.

We take that gladly because it ensures: