Our philosophy in building Tandem was to foster open communications between team members. This means sharing information about what you're doing. In particular, which work-app you're in at a given moment (for a set of 140+ integrated apps).

We've found this creates the feeling of being around the same table - you get a sense of who's coding, who's writing, who's talking with others, etc.

At the same time it's important to have focused time, free from interruption, to do deep work. One early tester referred to this need as "psychological aloneness" - we think PG's essay on Maker time is apt.

To that end, we give you control over what you share with your team. In addition there is a prominent "Focus" mode which lets you block incoming notifications.

Our approach to balancing privacy and transparency at the team level is constantly evolving, so we hope you'll give us feedback on what works best for you and your team!

For us as a company, we take your privacy very seriously. We will never eavesdrop on conversations or record them without your knowledge. We will never store your work data other than information that you voluntarily share with us.

We collect data about how our features are used and any errors users encounter for sole the purposes of making Tandem better, and data will not be sold for any reason or shared with a third party without the user’s permission.

You can see our full privacy policy here: https://tandem.chat/privacy