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Comment by rognjen | Hacker News Reader

I didn't mean privacy and security as in "you're gonna get hacked" but "you'll sell my data and know things you don't need to know".

You (and your providers) will not only know my spending but who I share a house/utilities/services with. And personally I place quite a high value on that data (as do others who trade it)

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Can confirm, as someone who works in the alternative data industry this service, if widely used, will create a dataset that can easily be sold for >$1M/year to hedge funds, credit agencies, etc.

I've seen quite a few companies that operate in this financial intermediary space and start off with strong privacy ideals, and then when they're getting traction and are raising a Series A/B can't resist adding a cool $5-10M ARR with near zero marginal cost by selling out.

Oh I see! From my experience, the companies that I've seen selling user data have no alternative revenue stream substantial enough to stop them from hemorrhaging money. They may also be giving most of their revenue back to their users or losing money every time their service is used. While building YSplit, we made sure it would make money every time it's used and that we would be able to upsell users on more features in the future. And the app is successfully achieving both at the moment.

If you truly intend to monetize that way, make a legally binding statement to never sell your users' data to anyone else. Otherwise I personally would never trust you, and honestly even then I'd be skeptical because I assume that legal contract would become void during an acquisition.

If I were to parse this comment in a lawyerly way, I'd conclude you didn't actually say whether your service does or does not sell users' financial data (or whether it plans to do so). Can you confirm for us your company's practices?

We do not sell any financial data and we do not intend on doing so in the future.

The fact that this is a VC-backed startup pretty much guarantees it will be doing nefarious things with its users' data somewhere down the line. Even if not intended right now.

This is an unfair comment because it's stated as a "pretty much" fact when it's simply your opinion.

Additionally, the fact that it's a "VC-backed startup" is irrelevant. Any company with any structure could be doing this.

Eh not really. Having VC backing means you have an extra incentive to do things that a bootstrapped company wouldn't, mainly to please your investors.

Either a business can thrive without selling user data, or it can’t. If it can’t, then eventually the data will fall in the hands of someone willing to sell it. It doesn’t matter if that someone is current management (perhaps under pressure from VCs) or future management (after inevitable acquisition or asset liquidation since the business is not viable). Therefore it does not matter how current management feels about selling user data today, or whether they are vc-funded or bootstrapped. If they aren’t building a viable business, the data they are collecting will be sold eventually.

Well, either it's in the TOS or it's not. Simple. And if it is now, and it vanishes, well, you know what to do.

I don’t see how this is a serious concern, even if they do it. I would just consider it part of the price of the service.

That's the entire point. I don't want to "pay" with my data and have no idea how it's being used. It's why I pretty much don't use any online services unless forced to.

My point exactly: if that was a serious concern, Facebook would have no users.

> I would just consider it part of the price of the service. reply

Which would make the service too expensive for me.

> Facebook

I don't use Facebook for the same reason.

But as I mentioned in the top level comment, this is a concern for me because I'm probably more privacy-conscious then an average user so I might not be exactly the type of user they're building for.

It could very well be a serious concern for you, but not a serious concern for most people. But then everyone has their own different serious concerns so if they're adjusting it here and there for everyone that would be a misallocation of efforts. So I think because of that it's more useful, at least for the developers of a product, to consider a larger set of users than a niche concern of a minority set of users.

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