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I would have loved/expected a short explanation as to why GDPR compliance took so long to achieve. I really love Instapaper and use it a lot. Especially the se

by q-base 8y ago

I would have loved/expected a short explanation as to why GDPR compliance took so long to achieve. I really love Instapaper and use it a lot. Especially the send to kindle feature. Luckily for them I did not stumble upon an easy 1:1 replacement. But not even explaining the challenges seems quite a bit off and suspect. It is not like I keep my health records there (at least to my knowledge :) )

TillE 8y ago
Yeah, they refused to say anything during the outage, and now they're still not providing the slightest bit of detail. There's really no excuse for that. With that total lack of transparency, I certainly wouldn't trust Instapaper in the future.
masklinn 8y ago
> I really love Instapaper and use it a lot. Especially the send to kindle feature. Luckily for them I did not stumble upon an easy 1:1 replacement. I finally gave up a few weeks back and migrated to pocket, turns out it has an importer for instapaper's CSV export, so it took about 5mn and it worked well enough for my purposes (saving articles from my twitter feed and new chapters of serials from feedly for later reading), so meh.
- q-base 8y ago
  I looked at Pocket as well, but the "send to Kindle" feature seemed to be missing?
  - masklinn 8y ago
    Ah that's possible, I don't have a kindle so that's not a thing I would be using.
  - r3bl 8y ago
    Yeah, it's not implemented. There's P2K[0] and crofflr[1] that act as middleware between Pocket and Kindle. [0] $3 per month subscription https://p2k.co/ https://p2k.co/ [1] $5 one time payment https://www.crofflr.com/#/home https://www.crofflr.com/#/home
    - q-base 8y ago
      Ahh thanks a lot! Pocket and Crofflr could be a solution. Does anyone have experiences with that combination for Kindle?
      - ac 8y ago
        I've been using it for a while. It's been the most convenient solution, and worth the price. Before that I used a 3rd party Send-To-Kindle bookmarklet, and Instapaper via Calibre in the past. Pros: + QR-codes at the end of articles to go back to them + Clean configuration + Scheduled delivery + Reliable Cons: - Often misses images and, sometimes, even text from the original page. To be fair, I have found to be the problem of every web->ebook converter out there. - It says it supports Kindle Back Issues, but they don't seem to work for Crofflr ebooks even on a top-of-the-line (Oasis) Kindle. Matter of taste: ~ I'd prefer for every article to be in a separate book so I can read out-of-order, and delete and bookmark them separately. But the navigation interface within the single book (issue) is very nice.
bumholio 8y ago
Possibly one of the worst cases of irrational GDPR fear. The fines would have been significantly lower than the (irreversible?) loss of European market share.
- evanelias 8y ago
  The max fines are based on the top-level parent company's global revenue. Instapaper was owned by Pinterest until being spun off very recently. Most likely, Pinterest's lawyers and executives were not OK with risking the fines, and also did not want to devote enough development resources to GDPR compliance for such a small subsidiary like Instapaper. Also explains why they'd spin it out -- GDPR changed the calculus. This is speculation, but I've seen this GDPR fear play out elsewhere. Large parent companies are very worried about those worst-case fines and want to ensure there's no risk whatsoever. The "Instapaper must be up to something sketchy if GDPR compliance took so long" narrative here seems pretty unfair. If their former owners are to blame for the long EU outage, it's understandable that Instapaper isn't going to publicly call them out -- they may even have agreements preventing this. And the whole spin-out probably took some time and logistical effort, so they couldn't reasonably focus on GDPR immediately after that either. (Edit: not trying to knock Pinterest either; their actions would be completely understandable given the max potential fines.)
- x0x0 8y ago
  It's not just the fines. Even assume you negotiate the regulator (or regulators!) down to something reasonable, your international law firm with relationships with the various regulators is going to price out at well over $500 US/hour. For a simple complaint to the regulator, you're probably staring at $15k or more of legal. In Pinterest's case where an Instapaper complaint could have triggered a general review of their business practices, I'd roughly estimate the costs of talking to the regulator at a half million dollars. Start with their counsel ordering sales & marketing leadership to grab engineers to create and review a consent log for every outbound sales and marketing contact in their system.
- Sujan 8y ago
  It is impossible for fines ($ or €) to be lower than market share (% or number of users). Also, what you probably meant is still not possible: As Instapaper was free under Pinterest, market share was connected to $0 of revenue. So any fine would be greater than the revenue of the app's European customers.
jorde 8y ago
Before going independent, Instapaper was owned by Pinterest. To me it always looked like Instapaper was left as founders' sideproject so it makes sense that Pinterest potentially didn't want to invest much into it (build GDPR), or take risks (face GDPR fines). Now that it has been sold/given back to the team, I doubt we'll ever get to hear the full story. I have major respect for Brian & co for continuing on the project and trying to make it a long term indie play.
- bthdonohue 8y ago
  Thanks Jorde – appreciate it!
donarb 8y ago
Maybe they wanted to be absolutely sure that they were complying with the law fully and make sure they had set up code and policies to easily enable data deletion and correction. The law is not just looking in your database to see if you have any "bad" fields. You can look at the diff of their privacy policy on GitHub and see that they added/changed some of the 3rd party libraries that were used, possibly they felt the old ones were not compliant enough for them (they removed ChartBeat and replaced Localytics with Crashlytics). https://github.com/Instapaper/privacy/commit/05db72422c65bb57b77351ee0a91916a8f266964 https://github.com/Instapaper/privacy/commit/05db72422c65bb5...
- EpicEng 8y ago
  Ok, so in that case, the answer would be "we didn't start until way too late, so we had to shut it down for a bit." I also imagine people are curious about why it took the amount of time that it did. How much info are they storing?

by q-base 8y ago

TillE 8y ago

Yeah, they refused to say anything during the outage, and now they're still not providing the slightest bit of detail. There's really no excuse for that. With that total lack of transparency, I certainly wouldn't trust Instapaper in the future.

masklinn 8y ago

> I really love Instapaper and use it a lot. Especially the send to kindle feature. Luckily for them I did not stumble upon an easy 1:1 replacement. I finally gave up a few weeks back and migrated to pocket, turns out it has an importer for instapaper's CSV export, so it took about 5mn and it worked well enough for my purposes (saving articles from my twitter feed and new chapters of serials from feedly for later reading), so meh.

q-base 8y ago
I looked at Pocket as well, but the "send to Kindle" feature seemed to be missing?
- masklinn 8y ago
  Ah that's possible, I don't have a kindle so that's not a thing I would be using.
- r3bl 8y ago
  Yeah, it's not implemented. There's P2K[0] and crofflr[1] that act as middleware between Pocket and Kindle. [0] $3 per month subscription https://p2k.co/ https://p2k.co/ [1] $5 one time payment https://www.crofflr.com/#/home https://www.crofflr.com/#/home
  - q-base 8y ago
    Ahh thanks a lot! Pocket and Crofflr could be a solution. Does anyone have experiences with that combination for Kindle?
    - ac 8y ago
      I've been using it for a while. It's been the most convenient solution, and worth the price. Before that I used a 3rd party Send-To-Kindle bookmarklet, and Instapaper via Calibre in the past. Pros: + QR-codes at the end of articles to go back to them + Clean configuration + Scheduled delivery + Reliable Cons: - Often misses images and, sometimes, even text from the original page. To be fair, I have found to be the problem of every web->ebook converter out there. - It says it supports Kindle Back Issues, but they don't seem to work for Crofflr ebooks even on a top-of-the-line (Oasis) Kindle. Matter of taste: ~ I'd prefer for every article to be in a separate book so I can read out-of-order, and delete and bookmark them separately. But the navigation interface within the single book (issue) is very nice.

bumholio 8y ago

Possibly one of the worst cases of irrational GDPR fear. The fines would have been significantly lower than the (irreversible?) loss of European market share.

evanelias 8y ago
The max fines are based on the top-level parent company's global revenue. Instapaper was owned by Pinterest until being spun off very recently. Most likely, Pinterest's lawyers and executives were not OK with risking the fines, and also did not want to devote enough development resources to GDPR compliance for such a small subsidiary like Instapaper. Also explains why they'd spin it out -- GDPR changed the calculus. This is speculation, but I've seen this GDPR fear play out elsewhere. Large parent companies are very worried about those worst-case fines and want to ensure there's no risk whatsoever. The "Instapaper must be up to something sketchy if GDPR compliance took so long" narrative here seems pretty unfair. If their former owners are to blame for the long EU outage, it's understandable that Instapaper isn't going to publicly call them out -- they may even have agreements preventing this. And the whole spin-out probably took some time and logistical effort, so they couldn't reasonably focus on GDPR immediately after that either. (Edit: not trying to knock Pinterest either; their actions would be completely understandable given the max potential fines.)
x0x0 8y ago
It's not just the fines. Even assume you negotiate the regulator (or regulators!) down to something reasonable, your international law firm with relationships with the various regulators is going to price out at well over $500 US/hour. For a simple complaint to the regulator, you're probably staring at $15k or more of legal. In Pinterest's case where an Instapaper complaint could have triggered a general review of their business practices, I'd roughly estimate the costs of talking to the regulator at a half million dollars. Start with their counsel ordering sales & marketing leadership to grab engineers to create and review a consent log for every outbound sales and marketing contact in their system.
Sujan 8y ago
It is impossible for fines ($ or €) to be lower than market share (% or number of users). Also, what you probably meant is still not possible: As Instapaper was free under Pinterest, market share was connected to $0 of revenue. So any fine would be greater than the revenue of the app's European customers.

jorde 8y ago

Before going independent, Instapaper was owned by Pinterest. To me it always looked like Instapaper was left as founders' sideproject so it makes sense that Pinterest potentially didn't want to invest much into it (build GDPR), or take risks (face GDPR fines). Now that it has been sold/given back to the team, I doubt we'll ever get to hear the full story. I have major respect for Brian & co for continuing on the project and trying to make it a long term indie play.

bthdonohue 8y ago
Thanks Jorde – appreciate it!

donarb 8y ago

Maybe they wanted to be absolutely sure that they were complying with the law fully and make sure they had set up code and policies to easily enable data deletion and correction. The law is not just looking in your database to see if you have any "bad" fields. You can look at the diff of their privacy policy on GitHub and see that they added/changed some of the 3rd party libraries that were used, possibly they felt the old ones were not compliant enough for them (they removed ChartBeat and replaced Localytics with Crashlytics). https://github.com/Instapaper/privacy/commit/05db72422c65bb57b77351ee0a91916a8f266964 https://github.com/Instapaper/privacy/commit/05db72422c65bb5...

EpicEng 8y ago
Ok, so in that case, the answer would be "we didn't start until way too late, so we had to shut it down for a bit." I also imagine people are curious about why it took the amount of time that it did. How much info are they storing?