Comment by pcthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pcthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

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Just going to play devil's advocate, but if you're at the point where you're going to sell your startup, does it make sense to take a stance that you're also advocating for user privacy by not installing Google Analytics? After all, whoever buys it is going to do whatever they want with that data, and add analytics if they want.

I'm not criticizing people who decide to sell their companies either, I get that it's the economic reality we live in.. it's just a shitty state of things that user's can't ever reasonably expect privacy from any service. Even the adblockers sell out to deep enough pockets.

It reminds me of the old joke (purportedly) involving Winston Churchill:

    Churchill: Madam, would you sleep with me for five million pounds?
    Socialite: My goodness, Mr. Churchill… Well, I suppose… we would have to discuss terms, of course…
    Churchill: Would you sleep with me for five pounds?
    Socialite: Mr. Churchill, what kind of woman do you think I am?!
    Churchill: Madam, we’ve already established that. Now we are haggling about the price.

I love to play devil's advocate. Often, you have your head deep in something and you forget to consider the other party, playing devil's advocate helps that.

And you are right, there will be no guarantee that the buyer will respect my user's privacy.

The point I (badly) wanted to make was that more and more services are leaving Google Analytics and move their analytics to a more privacy friendly service. Only accepting Google Analytics causes the service to lose a lot more sellers. Granted, being on Andrew shoes, that requires more work (integrating with all these services).

In reality, what bothered me is that they should have been upfront about it. Having a clear message saying that all the metrics are required, before filling all the details would have saved me a lot of time, and I would have been ok with it.

Oh yeah, that's a really deplorable practice on their part. I didn't have anything to contribute to that part though as I haven't actually heard of acquire or chartmogul before.

I was specifically responding to:

> Do you prefer your user privacy? Too bad you can't sell on Acquire

which I guess would have been more clear if I had included that quote in the first place.

The rest of your point (that Acquire is misleading and irresponsible with their treatment of other peoples' time) wasn't lost, don't worry

Yeah, that was not appropriate to the thread, I agree.

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