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Comment by bradknowles | Hacker News Reader

The landing page tells me nothing useful about this app. So, I'm not inclined to trust it at all, because anyone can claim they are "Powered by Consumer Reports", and without any evidence to back that up, it's just an empty claim.

Can someone please explain to me why I'm wrong?

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Refer to https://digital-lab.consumerreports.org/2022/11/16/introduci...

Okay. That link explains a little bit. Enough that I'd be willing to check it out now, in comparison to other tools like DeleteMe.

But it would have been nice to see that same information on the landing page for the software. Or at least have that link included in the original post here on HN.

Well that was a fast fail. I decided to try to have them request that Home Depot stop selling my data, and then the program seems to have hung on a blank page.

I hope the problem is that their servers are overloaded due to "HN Hug-o-Death", and not something else.

There are a lot more words there, but no more explanation of what it is.

Ok, we've changed to that from https://www.permissionslipcr.com/ above.

What do you see as the ideal response to your comment?

Do you feel that what you’ve said has been in service of soliciting that response?

I looked at the website for this app and got an idea of what it’s meant to do. I don’t think I’m particularly smart and found this to be along the lines of any other SaaS app marketing site.

If your gripe is that “anyone can claim that they’re powered by consumer reports”, are you also the sort of person to verify the claim yourself instead of outsourcing that to Hacker News? As made evident by another replier, more information was easily findable.

The link that was provided to the CR press release was a suitable response. That was enough to tell me that this thing probably actually is associated with CR, where I've been a member for over thirty years.

I still find it ironic that I learn about this thing here as opposed to official CR channels to their membership, but whatever.

Now, as it turns out, the product may well actually be associated with CR, but it's still a fail. At least for now, because they give me nothing beyond a blank page when I select the option to have them tell Home Depot not to sell my data.

I probably won't delete it yet, because I want to see where this product goes. And I want to see what it can do for me that DeleteMe (and other similar tools) cannot. But as of today, it's like the announcement of Twitter, and then getting nothing but a fail whale when I go there.

To be clear, here's a screenshot of the page I saw, which has virtually no useful and verifiable information on it: https://imgur.com/a/pV4PdSv

For that matter, could this have been done as a website rather than a mobile app?

Agreed. A web site would have been a much better solution that would have better served their members.

Besides the press/announcement post, if you opened the App Store link you’d have seen the publisher is Consumer Reports, with one of the other apps being the official CR app.

If they're going to have a web landing page at all, then it needs to tell you more than just giving you a link to the App Store and nothing else. At that point, it's just a pure waste of time. They shouldn't have bothered to build a web page at all, if that's what they were going to do with it.

It said quite a bit besides the links on the page.

I saw very little text. I saw some graphics where someone clearly spent some time to make some small sprites move around a bit to catch your eye, and links to open the App Store, and that's it.

If they're showing real text explanation of what the app is and what it does and why you might want to trust CR to allow them to do that for you, then they certainly didn't show any part of that on the web page I saw.

The web page I saw was basically useless. They would have been better off just making it a redirect to the actual App Store page.

I doubt you’d have been happy with anything they could have said. I tried downloading the app just now, and it didn’t do anything that surprised me based on what the landing page had described (with words in addition to images.) This isn’t a service I need, but the basic functionality and relationship to Consumer Reports was successfully communicated.

Including the text of the press release from CR, or even just a link to that press release would have been enough to at least get me to try the app.

But their landing page as I saw it was basically useless.

So, you're not the author are you? If so, then why would you hide your identity here?

No, and I’ve no relation to Consumer Reports. I’m not surprised you went for some weird attack there, sadly, after trying to find something wrong with a bog standard app explanation page.

But there was no explanation actually shown there. So there is no valid claim of a standard app explanation page.

Perhaps you saw a different page than I did, but there was nothing on the page that I saw that explained anything about the app itself or what it was supposed to do.

And there's nothing strange about asking someone if they happen to be the author when they are acting like a shill. When I am presented with a spade, I tend to call it a spade.

To be clear, here's a screenshot of the page I saw: https://imgur.com/a/pV4PdSv

What on this page do you find useful? What does this page look like on your device?

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