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I really love this sentiment. Unfortunately, it also seems really hard to build many kinds of applications in a way that follows this line of thinking. I've be

by stpn 3y ago

I really love this sentiment. Unfortunately, it also seems really hard to build many kinds of applications in a way that follows this line of thinking. I've been building a personal finance app with privacy in mind, but there are some places where you might begrudgingly "hold" a users' data that are just unavoidable. For instance, if we want to be a serious competitor and have bank integrations, then plaid etc. will require you to run a server that can see the data, even if you don't want it. We also don't collect names in our app, just an email, but good luck collecting payments, avoiding fraud or reporting taxes without collecting name and address. We've built our system to be as minimally invasive (e.g. in the above, financial data is only proxied to the user's device, never stored on the server), but that's only the "intention" part - there's just not a way to take the full measure.

MichaelZuo 3y ago
You can always make an app that is not competitive with those which do store user data…
stephenr 3y ago
> good luck collecting payments, avoiding fraud or reporting taxes without collecting name and address A client of mine collected just shy of $2M last calendar year (2023), and we only store an email address, and a password. The trick is, let the organisations that (apparently) need that extra data, collect the extra data themselves. Payments are offered via PayPal, Stripe and Amazon Pay, using their hosted payment pages. It works amazingly well. The Stripe and PayPal options can even be achieved without JS, if you wish. I believe you could also achieve a similar lack of PII using a JS-heavy 'embedded' solution for Stripe and maybe PayPal, but don't quote me on that.
- stpn 3y ago
  Oh yes, to be clear we’re not collecting any of that data ourselves, but it is in our stripe account. I suppose that data isn’t in _our system_ per se, but the arrangement is still relying on our privacy intentions over any systematic guarantee (“we simply don’t have this data”) we could give.

by stpn 3y ago

MichaelZuo 3y ago

You can always make an app that is not competitive with those which do store user data…

stephenr 3y ago

> good luck collecting payments, avoiding fraud or reporting taxes without collecting name and address A client of mine collected just shy of $2M last calendar year (2023), and we only store an email address, and a password. The trick is, let the organisations that (apparently) need that extra data, collect the extra data themselves. Payments are offered via PayPal, Stripe and Amazon Pay, using their hosted payment pages. It works amazingly well. The Stripe and PayPal options can even be achieved without JS, if you wish. I believe you could also achieve a similar lack of PII using a JS-heavy 'embedded' solution for Stripe and maybe PayPal, but don't quote me on that.

stpn 3y ago
Oh yes, to be clear we’re not collecting any of that data ourselves, but it is in our stripe account. I suppose that data isn’t in _our system_ per se, but the arrangement is still relying on our privacy intentions over any systematic guarantee (“we simply don’t have this data”) we could give.