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I agree that they are serious about privacy, though I'm not sure it means the same thing to them that it does to me. To me. Privacy includes not collecting data

I agree that they are serious about privacy, though I'm not sure it means the same thing to them that it does to me. To me. Privacy includes not collecting data that isn't strictly needed to provide the feature. At their scale, perhaps they could reasonably argue that they need all the data about you in order to provide their service, so my standards don't necessarily indict them as reckless with data, but I do worry that the features they want to provide are increasingly including features that I don't necessarily want, but they still collect the data. In preparation for machine learning, I suspect they have justified storing enormous amounts of data from device usage that will help them. As a software engineer, I totally appreciate the importance of data for making decisions, but once you get in the mode of collecting analytics and usage data, you cross somewhat of a line of privacy. Companies like apple justify this by saying that Apple doesn't sell or release any of the data, it's purely used internally, and this is clearly 100 times better than the sellers of data, but it is still collecting invasive data in the first place. I think ultimately the real Revelation will come when they either don't begin serious advertising, or they do.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
That's always been a basic philosophy of mine: "If I don't need it, I don't collect it."[0] It's surprising (to me) that this has actually caused working partners to get peeved at me. They want to occasionally do things, like see when people originally signed up (for example, we keep last activity, but not original inception. Last activity is important for doing things like culling cruft, but there's really no use in knowing when someone signed up -except for vanity metrics). If the "need" is "Occasionally want to look at vanity metrics," then that (to me) does not count as "justifies holding onto data." In our latest app, it is a fairly small app that Serves a small community, but we are constantly getting Chinese hackers, trying to get in. I won't be so arrogant, as to think they won't, eventually, get in, so we make sure that there's nothing in the liquor cabinet, if they finally break in. [0] https://littlegreenviper.com/welcome-to-little-green-viper/privacy/ https://littlegreenviper.com/welcome-to-little-green-viper/p...
- freedomben 3y ago
  Agreed, I wish more people thought like us! Hopefully as advertising fades, more people will start trying to differentiate on privacy.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

That's always been a basic philosophy of mine: "If I don't need it, I don't collect it."[0] It's surprising (to me) that this has actually caused working partners to get peeved at me. They want to occasionally do things, like see when people originally signed up (for example, we keep last activity, but not original inception. Last activity is important for doing things like culling cruft, but there's really no use in knowing when someone signed up -except for vanity metrics). If the "need" is "Occasionally want to look at vanity metrics," then that (to me) does not count as "justifies holding onto data." In our latest app, it is a fairly small app that Serves a small community, but we are constantly getting Chinese hackers, trying to get in. I won't be so arrogant, as to think they won't, eventually, get in, so we make sure that there's nothing in the liquor cabinet, if they finally break in. [0] https://littlegreenviper.com/welcome-to-little-green-viper/privacy/ https://littlegreenviper.com/welcome-to-little-green-viper/p...

freedomben 3y ago
Agreed, I wish more people thought like us! Hopefully as advertising fades, more people will start trying to differentiate on privacy.