Facebook knowing all the dumb crap I do on their platform really pales in comparison to the data privacy issues of an app. If I get a whiff of anything negative, I'm not using it. I'm suspicious already.
The caveats are below:
We collect anonymous, aggregate (as in "user-213sdfewfefwa") events. This is stuff like: > "user-awefawewa21312aef" opened the app > "user-efaoiwejf21321few" started a free trial
These are used for aggregate stats like "how many people use Quirk" or "do people read the articles?" This is recorded by the phone stores anyway, but we do this both so we can get some more Quirk-specific stuff and so we can combine Android and iOS data.
We also collect some base information on your phone. For example, what type of phone you have or what language you're using. This is basically a requirement to debug stuff; since there's a lot of bugs that crop up only on certain OS/Phone/languages.
If your phone crashes or there's an error thrown, we use Sentry to report it. This lib will collect some basic info like phone types, IPs, and then the stack trace of course.
In the future, we may provide a way for you to share a thought with a trusted friend or therapist. This has been a highly requested feature, especially by folks who would otherwise huddle around their phone during an appointment. To do this, our plan to use an expiring, private link. That means your thoughts will be stored in raw form in a DB and then get deleted within X days. This would only happen with your explicit consent and it's only for a thought you share rather than your whole list of thoughts. It's a button you have to press EVERY time, not an "automatic share my thoughts" sort of thing.
We'll also be adding a cloud-sync feature at some point so you never have to lose your thoughts when you switch phones. When we do this, all the thoughts will be end-to-end encrypted; so no Quirk employee will ever be able to see your raw thoughts.
Because we're a paid product, we have little incentive to read your thoughts or strip-mine your data. We're in the business of making you feel better; we're not reading your deepest darkest secrets to figure out how to sell you shoes or something. We don't want to know your thoughts. Unless someone explicitly tells us otherwise, we treat them like passwords.
> Because we're a paid product, we have little incentive to read your thoughts or strip-mine your data
That may be who you are now, but what if later you want to take on investor money? Then, the incentive to mine data becomes this: even more money. As Batman once told me, "power is never innocent."
I trust you when you say this, and I trust that you are being sincere. I do not trust the incentive structures of Silicon Valley to permit you to adhere to this principle.
Neither do I! My point is more so that we try to take steps not just to say "hey we don't read your thoughts" but also to align the incentive systems so that 10 years down the line we're at least pointed in the right direction.
I'm glad you're thinking about this. Good luck!