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Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

The problem is when not being complicated means they are aren't truthful. Do you track crashes? Do you have any logging that tracks an IP address?

I view my dedicated home IP as personal, if not all that private, information. Does minimal logging actually require storing personal information? Is there a common, or legal definition of what personal information is?

I'm all for simple policies, but I would also rather they be accurate, and I would hate to see people who are trying to do good by having a simple policy like that end up in trouble because the law doesn't quite agree.

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the app collects no data whatsoever. i have no idea what your IP address is (the app connects directly to environment canada to retrieve the raw radar data). no crash data/telemetry is collected automatically, but bug reports are welcome on the github repo. so please don't insinuate that this policy is not true.

and yes, there is a legal definition of personal information. since im based in canada, that would be as defined by PIPEDA (the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act)

> the app collects no data whatsoever. i have no idea what your IP address is (the app connects directly to environment canada to retrieve the raw radar data). no crash data/telemetry is collected automatically

!!! You're the best. Thank you! Unfortunately not US/Can, otherwise I'd immediately switch to your app just because of that (I'd buy it anyway if it was paid, just to show support).

I wish more devs would have this approach. You don't need telemetry to create good software. You don't need to monitor what the user does with your application, when and how. You don't need to log everything, or listen in on conversations with third-party APIs. You don't have to outsource testing and QA onto your users.

Crash logging is extremely useful for catching edge cases or third party failures so I wouldn’t give that up but there’s no reason why it can’t involve the user with a Firefox-style “is it okay to report this? Here’s what gets sent…” prompt and aggressive data scrubbing.

Sentry does a really nice job of restricting the data which is stored, for how long, and scrubbing things which might have been included by mistake. I was just setting up an on-premise server yesterday and it’s pretty easy to configure it server-wide in a privacy-preserving manner.

RE crash-logging Firefox-style, apps that do it this way gain a lot of respect from me, especially if they let me see the contents of the report before sending. I've even seen one or two Android apps that would handle bug reports by firing up an intent for sending e-mail, which when directed to the mail app, resulted with a new message, already filled in with all details, just waiting for you to press Send.

But you are sending personal data (ip address) to a third party by directly connecting to their service. Not sure about canadian privacy law, but eu company would need to list this third party in their policy.

edit: just realized this comes across like bikeshedding. I do applaud and like your approach to privacy and its simplicity. It wouldn't decrease the appeal of your app at all to mention that you query the environment canada data, which is probably a public service and will not missue the data itself).

It is totally awesome that you are not doing anything creepy, but I hope you can understand that some folks are going to be more wary nowadays and that is not a bad thing IMO.

I'm not trying to insinuate your policy isn't true, but to note that a simple policy isn't always applicable, and it might be a little complicated. All the "you"'s in my original comment can be taken as the "general you", not you specifically.

I wasn't trying to insinuate your policy was wrong (I actually assumed it was likely correct, a weather app doesn't generally require much in the way of server support from anything except the weather service), but that "Privacy policies don't need to be complicated" might be a bit optimistic for a lot of apps.

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