Comment by stoicShell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stoicShell | Hacker News Reader

> We have begun reaching out to external auditors and, in tandem, are opening up our operations to review by our users. This allows you to verify with your own eyes, whenever you want. WYSIWYG.

Technical side: color me very curious about that "our users" part. I can't wait to see what it entails.

Business side: bold move, it may prove to be a blue-ocean-like strategy, if substantiated. Interesting.

____

Some rambling about access, transparency and "open"-things

Most people don't know that under the terms of most democracies, in principle, any citizen has the right to go to any public office and request basically anything non-classified: documents, accounts, etc. The idea being that the State is but the expression of the sovereignty of the People.

Obviously, no one believes for one minute that any 'normal' citizen will be granted access to most things. It's just an artefact of idealism you hear in law classes and political activism circles I suppose (and it's grey-ish-ly somewhat applicable at the lowest, local level).

It would be interesting to see a new breed of "open-sourced" businesses granting access to customers (like States would to citizens), businesses whose value resides not in secret sauce — things like accounting, plumbing or VPN are probably "solved" matters of public knowledge. Because they can afford almost total transparency, they may as well weaponize it against rivals who can't — or won't. In markets where trust is anywhere from high-value to mission critical, this might just open wide a whole new blue ocean.

> Most people don't know that under the terms of most democracies, in principle, any citizen has the right to go to any public office and request basically anything non-classified: documents, accounts, etc. [..] Obviously, no one believes for one minute that any 'normal' citizen will be granted access to most things.

[citation needed]

In the US, there’s the federal Freedom of Information Act and state equivalents. You don’t walk into an office; you send requests online. And there are more exceptions than just classification, such as privacy. But it’s far from theoretical: normal citizens can and do obtain access to all sorts of interesting documents. Sometimes the agency will refuse to provide the information you want despite it not being covered by a valid exception, or tries to charge an unreasonable fee, but in that case you can sue them: that’s admittedly expensive and slow, but it’s possible. News organizations in particular do it all the time, and often end up winning.

Their business basically hinges on earning back the trust of their customers before the current subscriptions run out.

Having their own vpn applications put them in advantageous position when they were trusted but now its a liability. I don't see it as weaponizing so much as turning the liability into a trust buyback.

I wonder if they knew they'd get the negative reception, and that's why they offered a discount on multi-year subscriptions earlier this year. I bought a multi-year contract before they raised their monthly price, and from what I've seen on their subreddit, so did a lot of other people.

>Obviously, no one believes for one minute that any 'normal' citizen will be granted access to most things. It's just an artefact of idealism you hear in law classes and political activism circles I suppose (and it's grey-ish-ly somewhat applicable at the lowest, local level).

What are these "most things" that you're talking about? At least in the US, FOIA requests are incredibly powerful and quite easy to make. You can absolutely get access to most non-classified documents, with well defined exceptions (ie, privacy of others).

> Obviously, no one believes for one minute that any 'normal' citizen will be granted access to most things.

In the Netherlands we get reasonably close with what we call WOB requests (literally: Law of Public Governance).

It takes a long time before you get the data (months) and it gets manually redacted but requests like for example:

I would like to receive all internal communication of the ministery of Health with my name in the email body.

Generally, get honored.

FWIW it's not limited to your name, at least in Sweden it can be anything, but to some extent they can claim technical difficulties with performing the search. There are cases were one such request took thousands of hours to complete.

You can do the same in the US with FOIA

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