Comment by zeeg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zeeg | Hacker News Reader

David from Sentry-

I just wanted to say that we've heard your feedback and are going to follow up. I'm not going to say we'll make any changes to the ToS, but there is at least a huge lack of clarity and clearly some triggering language in a number of things.

There are many things we want to be able to do - much completely unrelated to the current generation of LLMs - that we simply cannot due our current set of terms. A good example of something that you might not care about, but is not explicitly clear in our terms: can we show your production average latency comparies to other applications? What about other web services? Other Python web services?

I think we can all agree we missed the mark on comms here, and we may need to clarify and/or re-think part of the data use strategy. We certainly are not intending to funnel customer IP or PII into a random chatbot, and at the end of the day trust is involved in these things as we cannot explicitly label every feature we have built or plan to build within our ToS.

While I dont think HN often represents our customer base 1:1, I do know our customer base also lurks here, and data security is and always has been of utmost importance to us. That isn't changing, and there's no conspiracy with investors or anything else going on.

Sentry customer here,

I understand that you don't want to be in the business of sharing your customer's IP, but it's hard to not see using your customer's internal diagnostic data for training as exactly that.

A universal opt-out of sharing data for training would go a long way in assuring me that I'm not about to find out that another customer is getting a snippet of quasi-private information (not sensitive to be PII, but not public enough to share). I can imagine that this'll be fine for a lot of customers but it makes me very uneasy.

Heck, you could probably incentive some users into sharing their data by gating "AI" features behind not opting-out.

Agreed! There's some things we think customers won't care about, that we'd like to leverage in general (latency benchmarking for example), but not everything is that.

Our current thought process is to support two additional consent mechanisms:

1) An opt-out for sharing data which has no risk of exposure to customers (e.g. think about our fingerprinting algo - we can train better heuristics for that without giving away any of your data).

2) An opt-in mechanism for sharing data, in exchange for access to the functionality, for anything that goes beyond the above. This is less well defined, and internally would be our default stance.

Our big TODO at this point is to clearly define those, build the consent mechanisms, and determine what, if any, updates we need/want to make to the ToS before enforcing it.

Customer here.

A) This raise a huge issues with IP and HIPAA. Unless you add specific limitations of model per customer with 0 shared information

B) I do not know what kind of product discovery process you did to think that "industry benchmarks" are what your customer wants, but its not. As an analytics startup owner I can tell you these are the kind of low effort "Features" people tell themselves their customer wants and its never holds when you actually perform discovery.

C) This is maybe something you want for your next VC round? do you need to shove proprietary LLM model to expand the valuation? I hope you do not crash and burn doing this.

D) When I opened my current startup I started with Sentry without even thinking about it, as it was what I used in my last company and it just worked. Sure as hell going to checkout Datadog and the alternatives as we speak. We are currently on a monthly plan, you tell me I have until Jan 26 to drop the service?

It looks as if this was published after the update, which you should take a look at if you haven't. That should answer some of your concerns.

https://twitter.com/zeeg/status/1743384320637849652

That said:

B) These arent fluff features we're building, and one of the most important features we need aggregate data on is core to our business (fingerprinting). The over rotation on generative AI in the topic is the problem - thats not a focus for us.

C) This has nothing to do with investors, and Sentry's well capitalized both from prior rounds as well as cashflow. This is simply us needing to be able to develop stronger features that have moved beyond what we can easily capture in hand-to-hand development.

> can we show your production average latency comparies to other applications?

This is pretty standard: many companies explicitly add contract language to NOT be included in these benchmarks. The reasons should be obvious, offering these benchmarks on increasingly narrow segments walks right up to betraying competitive information.

source: I work at another observability company where we DON'T share our customers information with each other

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