Subsequently: https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770
The authors replies seem pretty rude (or at least somewhat aggressive / dismissive). Kagi is Vlads baby and I could imagine he would care and try to explain when he thinks someone has the wrong idea. However to the author - it’s just another service he doesn’t use anymore.
His business collects email addresses, which is a process. Under GDPR, this process must be documented, users must be given their data on request (even if it just contains an email address, but usually it also contains the signup date for example as a proof for their data processing consent) and users must be informed about their rights to correct or delete such data.
He comes off totally as the "trust me bro" guy with zero respect for a different perspective and doesn't seem to be interested in changing his (objectively wrong) opinion. It is almost laughable, because "is email PII" has been discussed a million times since the introduction of the GDPR that you must've lived under a rock to dismiss it like Vlad did.
Point is: if the business requests an email address, many people will provide their real email adress and your business needs to document this process under GDPR. I just checked. The signup form doesn't say "please give a FAKE email address", it just says "email address".
If a user provides a real email address, Kagi must respond to GDPR Art. 15 requests by providing...that same email adress. Might sound silly, but usually, there is other data associated with this. Usually, at least the timestamp of the signup. If a business is really GDPR compliant, it will offer a download option for stuff like user settings and so on.
Or, if the user signed up and later deleted the account, his email should explicitly NOT show up when asking for personal data.
See, it is about documenting the process, whether the outcome is "here is your email address you just asked for" or "we don't have any data on you". And Vlad says that this process is irrelevant for Kagi, while it is not.
I've made a bunch of SAR's, including pre-GDPR and I've never received one that contained my user settings, so that seems pretty normal.
The whole PII convo seems incredibly asinine though, "PII" is not a thing in the GDPR. Personal data is[1], but that's not the same thing.
If Kagi keep a record of searches performed by a user, that's something that a SAR should be used for, but the whole convo just misses the mark entirely.
[^1]: See article 4.1 https://gdpr-info.eu/art-4-gdpr/
That is odd because the user has right to get ALL the data they want that is stored about them in the service.
If he's positioning his company to challenge that law when he runs afoul of it, that's a choice they can make but it's a business risk (and IANAL, but... Probably one they'll lose).
> Personal emails are PII. But you can register to Kagi with a random email, and that is not PII.
Company has no means to identify what is the difference between personal or random email. Everything can be and must be treated equally from privacy perspective.
Vlad comes off as fairly unhinged here.
In my eyes this rationale would make sense if there was no backstory to this. If there was no preceeding blogpost, I'd consider Vlads messages pure spam.
But the context here is different: The author wrote a very critical, and clearly opinionated blogpost. There was clear intention in engaging with this subject.
Now the author seems to want to avoid responsibility, while Vlads attempt to react to a public hit piece with a respectful conversation was honestly the best way to handle this.
That's the fundamental premise of telling people that they are sealioning.
Not everyone agrees with it (I suspect age plays more a role than anything else).
Your historical example doesn't really map very well to today, because control over the ability to put some text somewhere that others can read it is very, very different than it was historically.
None of this excuses the Kagi CEO's failure to back off when asked/told to. They should just have used their own blog or equivalent to respond.
Still, generalizing to a broad claim about raising an issue in public creating no future obligations seems somewhat wrong to me. You don't have to speak in public about anything at all. For me, your choice to do so creates some limited obligations towards future engagement (though I'm not sure quite where the limits lie).
Yes, and then that engagement - which very much took place - did not give the author any confidence that FURTHER ENGAGEMENT (via email) would change the situation.
If I talk to you back and forth about an issue I have and feel like I'm talking to a brick wall, so I then write a critical review based on those issues, why should I be forced to not be a brick wall, in return? If Vlad wants someone to listen to him, he should probably take some time to engage with (not just 'listen to') what is being said on it's fundamental merits (not whatever surface level bit he wants to latch on to).
Recontextualizing an issue is not addressing it. Explaining an issue is not addressing it. Describing a paradigm that contextualizes an issue is not addressing it.
Vlad saw something critical of his hard work and wanted to put in the effort to clarify his stances and mend a relationship. I can absolutely understand that, your work is a reflection of yourself and nobody wants to be judged on misunderstanding. He might've even felt like he let someone who cared about Kagi down and wanted to make it right. Again, all understandable!
However, twice, the blog post author said they did not want to engage. At this point, regardless of how you feel about what was said, you should probably move on; they said their piece, you tried to engage, they rebuffed, oh well, do something else! To continue on is both incredibly annoying and a bit unhinged.
If Vlad absolutely felt like he needed to respond to this, he should've digested the main points of the original blogpost, reflected on them, and written his own blog post to a more general audience. Not necessarily in _response_ to the author, but understanding that more people probably feel this way as well and want to hear clear answers. Perfect examples of this would be an "Our stance on privacy" or "How we're ensuring Kagi's future," again factoring in the criticism from the author.
I write all of this as someone who pays for and likes Kagi. I think it's a good product, if a bit scattered at times. But the blog post does hit on some concerns that I have (privacy being the biggest) and seeing the follow up leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
But beyond that, there's some irony in that exchange. If Vlad had simply stopped engaging when Lori asked, it would indeed make Lori seem like more of an asshole for rejecting an appeal to have a simple conversation. But then Vlad transgressed that wish, making Lori's case about not wanting to engage.
If anything the replies in that Mastadon thread make the author and others appear petty, combative and immature imo, and I do not say that as someone who agrees with all Vlad's perspectives.
I'm all for generally leaving people alone, and being civil, but context please.
You don't get to open a salvo against someone, while pretending you're above interaction with them, then play the victim when they respond and universally and unilaterally dictate terms while always trying to get the last word in.
Anyway, I just think that people do things in online discussions that they wouldn't do to someone's face. And that tends to be a bad thing for reasonable discourse.
The Internet has turned us into sociopaths.
In the thread linked above, I think his reasoning for posting the email is reasonable. I find this similar to what the Apollo dev did when discussing with Reddit people. If he didn't record the conversation or make it public, his words could have been twisted.
Ummm dating and breakups?
Imagine doing this in the offline world. How well would this kind of behavior go over with people at the grocery store, do you think? Why is it acceptable online to behave like this?
The internet levels the playing field so the random person has the power to post criticism of the more powerful person and be heard. It doesn’t make sense to compare with the offline world because this wouldn’t be able to happen outside the internet.
In response the CEO is attempting to force them into a different context where he once again has power. The author recognizes this and therefore refuses.
This is psychotic behavior.
There’s a huge spectrum between NY Times writing a sourced article about a powerful business magnate and someone disparaging an SMB owner on their blog. If I took the posts and emails of someone I knew in my life and posted them online, I would probably get a call from the police.
I feel that Vlad is justified, even if I personally would've just considered it to be a lost cause and just kept receipts in case it became necessary to publicly respond, similar to how the Apollo dev released receipts when Reddit tried to make him out to be in the wrong.
I've also had a similar discussion with Vlad on comments here, he definitely doesn't try to view things from other people's perspectives.
> I may not have spelled this out explicitly in my previous reply but I will do so here: I am not interested in getting more replies from you on this subject. Declining a call does not mean I want you to argue with me about Kagi in email either. I do not trust you, personally, either and do not want to have a conversation about that. And for the record, I read that blog page already. If you had read my own blog post, you would notice that I link to it.
replying with a 1100 word long email is a mood.
What mood?
>Yes, hello so called prince of Nigeria. I have no interest in a discussion about the intricate court politics of Nigeria or its Byzantine inheritance rules. As you can see from my blog post it is entirely unlikely you would ever gain the throne even with my $2,000 wire transfer.
The only thing I take away from that is I'm very happy I don't know either of them and am never likely to.
https://d-shoot.net/files/kagiemails.txt
Read them yourself, but to me they look like the emails of a persistent salesman. They were remarkable only in that they provide more excuses than concrete responses.
> Not even Google ever printed 20k tshirts to give away for free.
For a couple of my university years I had nothing but free Google t-shirts. They were throwing so much of this crap around that my closet was halfway to 20k. I only lamented they never gave away Google trousers or briefs.
They have a fair shot at competing with Google on quality of search and they should focus on that. If they think they can complete on AI, email or swag - good luck, and I hope you have a good money printer.
Like, these days you do not know when you email someone if they reply to you, or if they will post screenshots of your entire conversation to social media showing how utterly disgusted they are because you dared talk to them.
Have these people forgot about how strangers in real life behave and communicate?
I miss talking with the average idiot from the 2000s internet.
Yes, my impression as well. (I have never used Kagi but have considered trying it.)
Among the other things, the blog author approvingly put up a screenshot with someone insisting on seeing the entire world through their own political views and demanding others do so as well. ("Actually, the word 'politics' means 'everything', and also I'm right and everyone else is wrong.") As the meme goes, they need to touch grass.
> I may not have spelled this out explicitly in my previous reply but I will do so here: I am not interested in getting more replies from you on this subject. Declining a call does not mean I want you to argue with me about Kagi in email either. I do not trust you, personally, either and do not want to have a conversation about that. And for the record, I read that blog page already. If you had read my own blog post, you would notice that I link to it.
If they don’t want to talk, just don’t respond.
The author also cross posted their blog to multiple social media platforms, which I assume means they wanted it to get attention. But then when the CEO does see it and offers some explanations they get mad that the CEO “vomited out” a reply that they didn’t want? I’m sorry, but the CEO of Kagi definitely sounds like the reasonable one here, thanks for linking this thread.
I understand not wanting to engage in a conversation about a product you don't care about, but after collecting so much information and writing a lengthy blog post about it, that is a different story. In my eyes, the author wrote a hit piece largely based on personal grudges, and then wanted to avoid any kind of responsibility.
And from my point of view, a lot of the financial stuff "makes sense". This is a small startup, probably with little business experience, and it shows. But why make it look like they are doing evil because of small, negligible mistakes?
Narcissism.
I actually stumbled across the AI stuff being turned off by default yesterday when I got curious and was poking around the feature request forum. It was explicitly because a lot of people hate it for moral/ethical reasons. A lot of the comments in the replies are specifically about the AI stuff in spite of it being disabled by default.
Most of this seems fine for a startup?
Perhaps Vlad is a little excessively enthusiastic and protective of his baby. But then you don't do something frankly crazy like start a new search engine from scratch in 2023 without being a little bit off. If we actually want a viable alternative to the advertising-funded search monopolies, we've got to be tolerant of some personality quirks.
And perhaps the T-shirt gambit is a poor use of limited resources. But have any of the startups that ended up making it big not make a few poor investments on the way up? I'll forgive it.
Meanwhile, Vlad's response does spell out several ways in which this lori exaggerated or misinterpreted things. Which of course are not acknowledged or responded to at all, despite lori's self-important tone. If you want to take your ball and go home because somebody doesn't take your concerns seriously, well you can, but don't expect me to follow you.
IMO, Vlad would have been better-off making his response his own blog post somewhere rather than an e-mail exchange. But eh, at least it's out there.