HalloApp: a digital space for people who you know and want to connect with | Hacker News Reader

HalloApp: a digital space for people who you know and want to connect with

halloapp.com

29 pointsrobinhood55 comments

Recent and related:

Former Facebook, WhatsApp employees lead new push to fix social media - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31267218 - May 2022 (155 comments)

also: https://twitter.com/neerajarora/status/1521964283466113024

Just let me stop you right there as I reiterate what Apple App Store has to say about HalloApp and its privacy:

    Data Linked to You

The following data, which may be collected and linked to your identity, may be used for the following purposes:

* Contact Info

Phone number (your most prized privacy info). This is a FULL-STOP right there in these days and ages.

* Contacts

Contacts (your entire address book, who would want to pull down the proverbial pants and leave their derrière exposed and tangle with the wind?)

* Identifiers

User ID (probably your Apple ID, after sufficient reverse mapping).

* Diagnostic

Crash data, not hard to get even more relational mapping from this.

############# # Signal

Compare that to SignalApp:

* Contact Info

That is entire optional and can be left blank within the Settings->Contacts->My Card of which that should always be blank.

Nothing to see there, move along.

> We use your phone number to connect you with friends and family. Beyond that, we never collect, store or use any personal information and never show you ads. Never. For real.

From their homepage. Contact Info and Contacts sharing are inherent to this app, it seems. It's worth noting that "beyond that, we never collect [more personal information]" is pretty clearly incorrect, since they do at least also collect contacts.

Their Privacy Policy[0] also does not inspire confidence:

> We may share personal data we get with service providers who help us provide our Services

We're not selling your data, we're sharing it.

Which service providers? What are their policies around my data?

> We may transfer your personal data to service providers, advisors, potential transactional partners, or other third parties in connection with the consideration, negotiation, or completion of a corporate transaction or proceeding in which we are acquired by or merged with another company or we sell, liquidate, or transfer all or a portion of our business or assets

We're not selling your data, we're transferring it.

This clause esp. makes me loath to sign up, since all this good will around privacy protections goes away in a sale. Given that this was made by WhatsApp devs, perhaps they understand the value of data...

[0] https://www.halloapp.com/privacy/

Yep. I concur.

Not necessary to have a phone support (such as your entire address book/contacts or your identity/MyCard) fot social indexing in these days and ages.

As Signal App have adequately demonstrated that.

> We're not selling your data, we're transferring it.

To be fair, if they get purchased or otherwise change hands, you'd want the data transferred and not deleted or siloed so it can't be used for its intended purpose.

> in which we are acquired by or merged with another company or we sell, liquidate, or transfer all or a portion of our business or assets.

This reads to me like "if we or our product become part of something else, that something else is now us".

Only the most aggressive reading... "we sell... all or a portion of our assets" can be read as them selling your data for profit. Does that mean they won't? No, but the terms look like they're either hiding it well or it isn't their intention.

I don't have great trust in tech companies, but I have some faith when the marketing is predicated on privacy, that a sale would ruin their reputation.

I don't see that as an "aggressive" interpretation of the words – that's the actual provision in the policy. There's a lot in that sentence, let's reduce it to the relevant stuff:

> We may transfer your personal data to [third parties] in connection with... a corporate transaction or... we are acquired by or merged with another company or we sell, liquidate, or transfer all or a portion of our business or assets

I don't understand why a company preaching privacy wouldn't want to show good faith by making an ironclad privacy policy around the same.

Making the privacy policy more specific than necessary will expose them to many frivolous lawsuits.

"We're not selling your data, we're sharing it"

Hmmm what is that supposed to mean? If they're sharing it they're doing it for a business reason right

My point is: their homepage says that beyond a phone number, HalloApp will "never collect, store or use any personal information"

But their privacy policy says something different.

The first example that came to my mind is that they share the data with AWS. Nowadays it's pretty normal to use other people's computers to run your service.

My phone number is definitely not my "most prized privacy info." If it was I'd be in trouble because there are all sorts of transactions, both digital and analog that require giving a phone number. At least in the US, if you refuse to give anyone your phone number, you'll have a hard time living a normal life.

And you compare to Signal, which also requires your phone number, and uses it as the primary identifier.

Pretty sure Signal also collects your phone number.

Sure. But it is a phone number that I do not use much less answer.

Just took a look at the landing page, but I didn't see any information on how they expect to monetize the app. Are they going to charge for it?

I'm fine if they are charging it, but all the problems with social media are pretty much a direct result of their business model. So putting out something that is free, without an explanation of how they eventually expect to pay for it all, is not something I would trust.

Based on this [1] article, seems like they add subscription later. I have also seen some mentions about paid features, so maybe subscription unlocks them.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/19/22584551/halloapp-private...

While I like the idea, AFAICT there's no actual web interface, only access through iPhone/Android apps.

Which is a deal-breaker for me.

That said, is anyone here actually using HalloApp? If so, what are your impressions so far?

Yep, if you want to go with privacy first, then make web interface and let us believe that you at least try to make it privacy friendly by allowing more user control and strict sandboxing.

There are anti-patterns in many websites to make people to use native apps - simply because it is easier to collect more user data.

Thats because its mobile-first! Like 2016! The founders and their stakeholders all agreed, trendy! Like in 2016!

Like Yo! But Hello, but spelled the German way Hallo! and because there already is a social network (and mobile app) called Hello, and other communications apps called Hello, and its also cool to mispell startup names, a web 2.0 staple, like last decade!

I use it to share certain activity photos with a small group who aren't on Insta/F (like me). For that, it's great. No expectation that it'll be around forever -- it's just real time photos of us on vacation in a way that doesn't bombard Messages.

I get the use case, I don't get why there is a need for yet-another app for it when there group messaging apps can do that.

> in a way that doesn't bombard Messages

I'm pretty sure that you can just mute notifications from WhatsApp/Telegram/Matrix/XMPP/Messenger-du-jour...

It has feed about posts like original Facebook without algorithms. WhatsApp et al. does not have.

Ah, ok. So then the question becomes "why not Mastodon/Pixelfed/Pleroma", especially now that they are implementing "private group" functionality and you can choose who gets to see your posts (besides the usual public/followers-only/private message)?

I’ve thought of standing up my own private mastodon, but asking these people get mastodon accounts for this single use case isn’t really what any of them want. We’re all social media averse, and mastodon is still like a twitter. hallo is private/closed by default and allows for signals and comments.

Okay, last attempt! Take a look at https://movim.eu/

It's open social media based on XMPP, you can set up your own server if you want.

What can be done with this that can not be done with a personal WhatsApp/Telegram/Matrix/XMPP group?

Its private, free, and with no ads...

... well until we need to make money, when we will sell all of that to someone.

And for this to be a viable thing how is this paying for itself or how will it eventually?

I "trust" it.

Terrible name, but good idea. However, the ecosystem for social media apps is so polluted (just open any app store and see all the "social media app" spam) that gaining any sort of market share is likely not possible.

No web, no thank you! I'm tired of these mobile-only apps like Snapchap and the likes! I want to be able to move from one device and another without having the phone always in my hand!

How are they going to address the problem of connection creep? (Over time the number of people you add to your friends network increase and cause context collapse)

They will hire you - there now it's your problem.

That’s not a problem since they have no users.

So this is basically WhatsApp in terms of functionality?

Tip: it's not an official grammar rule, but in colloquial terms, scare quotes [1] are often used to indicate that the speaker is being sarcastic or that the quoted thing isn't actually true. So a typical American reader might infer from your title that this app is not _really_ "private" or "free".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes

BBC news articles are full of scare quotes then.

A non American publication, exhibit a

the bbc usage is scare-quote-adjacent, they mean "this is not us saying this, it is someone else who said it and we are reporting it verbatim" (implied: we make no claims as to its accuracy)

I think OP intended to use them in the same way. I can find a direct reference to "private" and "no ads" on the landing page, "free" is not written anywhere so that's a miss.

In the headlines. The journalistic use of scare quotes around single words in headlines is so they can trumpet claims without taking legal responsibility for them.

They are more commonly used just to communicate to the reader about which part of the headline is paraphrased and which part is not. A subject’s diction can be very important in many news stories and so quotations of this type can communicate a lot of information in a short headline. It also indicates when a phrase is not editorial in nature, but a claim made by someone else.

Single-word quotes can't help but be taken out of context.

They can be used that way, but hard news sources typically use them in pretty unambiguous circumstances.

Like ‘Disaster left “devastating” path of destruction, says mayor’

Those are just traditional quotes, used to indicate that the words are something that someone else said, verbatim.

I definitely read the title as sarcasm.

Yeah, if it's private, free, and has no ads why is the title not simply:

Like Facebook, but smaller and private and free with no ads.

I don't know if the submitted title ('Like Facebook, but smaller and “private” and “free” with no “ads”') was intended to be sarcastic, but since the OP itself does not include that language (with or without quotes), we've changed it above to something it does include.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/dr-evil-air-quotes

(We've since changed the title - more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31290944)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com