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Comment by odshoifsdhfs | Hacker News Reader

> I know some of these tracking APIs send data to third parties directly, but if that was banned all this traffic would just be re-routed through the app developer's back end so it would just sweep the problem under the carpet.

I quit a job over this. I don't remember exactly which service it was we were using (mixpanel maybe?) and we found out some users where blocking access to service servers (either at router level or something else). The solution? make a proxy api endpoint that would just re-route the calls to the service.

I beg and begged, saying 'look, these are users that specifically blocked 'service', lets respect that and get our data from the users that haven't' (this was before the Apple privacy changes a couple years ago). I was steamrolled because they knew better than users. I handed my notice the moment the ticket landed in the board.

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That’s awesome that you quit over that. Good on you.

I care deeply about this stuff, and I’ve read a couple of contemporary public studies - both corporate and state funded - that suggest that end-users really do care about this stuff too, and that abandonment due to poor privacy policies can be on the order of 40%. Forty percent!!

So I started my last business with this in mind: a pro-privacy fintech business. We were gonna be proud of our privacy policy and implement it using technical means.

But the moment the investors came along, I got stonewalled. They didn’t care about the research. They didn’t care about the users. They just had this belief that a user friendly privacy policy would somehow hurt the business and they refused to commit to what I saw as a key advantage of the product. Our privacy policy was a nightmare. We had almost nothing to give users.

I quit too, and to this day, I have no idea what could possibly be worse than 40% abandonment in a sales oriented fintech.

I feel like investors have too much influence in business decisions they don't quite understand. I understand that it's their money at risk, so they want the greatest return in the least time, but their excessive influence has soured many great things.

Maybe something like small stockholders would work, as they are not even allowed to vote in the direction the company takes, so their only influence is selling stock (voting with their wallet). It would certainly widen the door for fraud, but it's not like fraud in uncommon with the current system, and I'm tired of seeing how this tale keeps repeating in practically any area of commerce.

I agree. Investors are conservative, but changing the world isn’t.

More than conservative, they're voracious. Some investments fail, and others don't, and they want to extract maximum value of the latter without stopping to understand why did they work. Consequently, they slowly turn the latter into the former.

Yeah I 100% agree. None of the people involved in my last business have any interest in understanding how they fucked up. They blame me, because I kept pointing out that what they were doing was not going to work. It didn’t work - and somehow that’s now my fault!

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