Hacker News Reader

Comment by katzeilla | Hacker News Reader

- your landing page says 'On Circles, your data is encrypted at rest. This means no ads or questionable business.', how does data being encrypted relate to 'no ads'?

- asking for contacts while saying nothing about how you monetize is a huge red flag to me

- since you are already using cross platform JS framework, how about making it available as a PWA? or maybe provide apk directly? google store doesn't cover a sizeable number of android devices

- your landing page still says 2021 in its footer

View on HN

- Ads on any sort of app are generally targeted. Meaning they use personal information, including browsing history, to serve you specific ads that you are more likely to click on. By encrypting data at rest and, asking for little personal information, we purposely make it more difficult for us as a company to serve targeted ads. Ideally it would be impossible and this is what we aim for in the short term.

- Fair point. Noted.

- Both points here would be a relatively easy step, so will figure something out. Thanks!

- Noted. Thanks!

I think you need to clarify what you mean by at rest. You mention browser history but it's not clear to me if you mean that it's encrypted in the browser. If you mean it's encrypted within your data store on your servers, that's great for security but doesn't really address the ad concern. I'm assuming you hold the encryption keys. If that's the case, you can decrypt the users' data in your data store for ad targeting purposes.

In terms of the ad concern, through our choices we have already made that inconvenient to do. At the moment we do hold the encryption keys, but as privacy seems to be a great concern (as we expected it to be) we will continue to push forward our practices on privacy.

So to be clear, anything you share on Circles is encrypted in transit with SSL/TLS, then encrypted at rest on our servers, to which we currently (but hopefully not for long) hold the keys.

> how does data being encrypted relate to 'no ads'

I guess they are talking about data-mining your at-rest data for personalised ads.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com