Comment by PaybackTony | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaybackTony | Hacker News Reader

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When we started building this we were adamant about making something we wanted to use. There are a number of open and successful options out there, they just didn't work the way we wanted it to. Building a general network that appealed to us and our parents / co-workers meant we had to make sure the experience was just right and is why we went for a ground up approach. Unfortunately that puts users in the position that they have to just trust our words when it comes to privacy. Trust is earned and we just got started. I can make promises about not selling out but until we prove it they will just be words. We are users ourselves, we don't want to feel like we're being watched and have every grain of data out there for advertisers to see. In time we hope to prove we want that for everyone else too.

This is not to say we haven't been actively looking at ways we can open up or become compliant with a few of the open protocols that already exist as long as it fits with the personal privacy we want for our users on top of the data privacy.

Well that's the thing. Transparency is a dependency of trust. And as it stands, I for one ain't seeing a lot of the transparency, seeing as how (AFAICT) we can't see "under the hood". The lack of a published privacy policy is another red flag; publishing that policy - and including the necessary provisions to ensure that Slyde or any future owners/operators thereof will always put user privacy first - would go a long way toward establishing that transparency and therefore trust.

That said, it's a similar problem with DuckDuckGo: how do we know they're respecting users' privacy? DDG has it easy, since they're a search engine; absolutely nothing about their product requires storing any info about their users whatsoever, and thus (as far as anyone knows, and as far as they say) they don't. Slyde, however, is a social network, which makes the collection and storage of data much harder (if not impossible) to avoid.

I don't think I could argue with these points. The Privacy Policy right now is only on the Register page and is a standard Termly one. I think some better effort needs to be put into this on our side to make a simple one and have it more clear, on the homepage. DDG had a couple bumps at the beginning but they made it through and through time established trust. But like you said, Slyde is a social network and has a greater responsibility given the kinds of data people are putting on it, to keep it private. Long story short I appreciate this take and agree with you.

In any case, I wish y'all the best of luck. Even if Slyde never achieves a perfect privacy story, it'd at least be an improvement, especially if coupled with a strong privacy policy and a solid picture of how things work behind the scenes.

Another huge help on the transparency front would be to at least ensure the source code for any apps is publicly available. Even if not necessarily under a FOSS license (though that'd be a bonus), the apps being as easy as possible to independently audit would alleviate a lot of my own concerns with these sorts of social networking apps doing scummy things like using the microphone for ad targeting.

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