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Comment by dzink | Hacker News Reader

You are in luck. I found a little video I took of the screen when it happened. It was from Aug 11 2020. Here is a screenshot with the log details: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/g9jv8eh1ugi5qda0c6azx/0811202...

View on HN

Here is another screenshot and screenshots of the email exchange with the person in the logs. https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/v0x26d5jvou5k9gvx5tnd/IMG_205...

Emails: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/s6ed1brrcvc0hncig7nm0/IMG_205...

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ohafavhr9nlqfedlbfxrd/IMG_206...

What the hell. Thank you for keeping the receipts. That's astonishingly not-ok.

Hey, clarifying

Roam actually DID NOT READ THEIR DATA (we have always had the policy of never accessing user data without explicit user permission). She just misunderstood what she was looking at.

More (verifiable) details in my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44047945

Got it. Not being an expert on that, I’ll take you at your word.

But in the spirit of constructive criticism, your user had been carrying that belief for 5 years now because no one explained it when they originally reported the finding.

Baibhav posted this screenshot down the thread, but I wanted to add some more context.

We followed up with our ex-employee to get the final (cutoff) message in this email thread https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/firescript-577a2...

In it he tries to explain that these are help graph transactions they are seeing. I do apologize if you didn't understand it at the time, but we did try to explain it to you. I Hope this clears up everything for anyone following along.

Thanks for sharing, see Baibhav's response for what happened here, these logs you are seeing are for the public help graph, not your personal graph.

Hey thank you for replying!

I understand what the screenshots are saying and this makes it clear that it was a misunderstanding and that NO ONE ACCESSED YOUR GRAPH(S). Please let me explain

Lets start with your first screenshot: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/g9jv8eh1ugi5qda0c6azx/0811202...

If you take a look at this screenshot, it shows that the values you saw are in the indexeddb db "..._help-tx". The "help" bit denotes that those are the actions/txs taken in the "help" graph (which you can access via https://roamresearch.com/#/app/help). The reason you're seeing Bardia and Conor's emails there is because they wrote in the help graph (maybe they were writing guides there or adding stuff to the changelog). The reason the help graph data is in your indexedDB is because you probably opened the help graph at some point.

If someone had accessed your graphs, similar txs would have shown instead in the indexeddb dbs "..._DZ-tx" or "..._programming-with-categories-tx"

Everything I've said above can be verified if you say go to any Roam graph, and see what dbs are stored in IndexedDB in the devtools.

Hopefully this makes sense. Also, as Bardia replied in the email, we have never and will never edit user notes without explicit permission.

tl;dr: You thought you were looking at the logs for your graph but you were looking at the logs for the "help" graph. This is easily verifiable from your screenshots itself if you know where to look (details above).

If I were the user, I would’ve been unsatisfied with that answer. They had logs showing that yes, someone did appear to access their notes. No one seems to have corrected the misunderstanding at the time, which might’ve turned them back into a happy Roam user.

Don’t do that. Things like this are an opportunity to overcommunicate. Explain in detail to the user, who’s smart enough to use the tools to reveal the information in the first place. Write up a FAQ entry explaining this for the next person so you can point them right to it. Don’t just reply to say basically “you didn’t actually see that” and leave it at that.

Thank you

Yes, definitely a communication misstep on our part, and we could've handled it much better

I have a second comment there too, but got delayed in posting because HN rate-limited my account for too many comments

Here is a video explanation and verification, in case the above is hard to follow: https://www.loom.com/share/2a0247ab163747508e28e4a79190583a

What is our fault that we did not clear up this misunderstanding immediately and I'm sorry for that dzink (I think this was during the time of Roam hypergrowth so maybe Bardia missed the later email reply?)

Hopefully, it is now clear that NO ONE accessed your graphs (and no graph is ever accessed without explicit user permission)

P.S. I took this video & wrote this message alongside my earlier one but could not post because HN said "You're posting too fast. Please slow down" XD. Hence the new account. Please do not block me because of this, mod

Edit: Thanks kstrauser, for letting cooler heads prevail (couldn't delete because this comment had your reply)

Don’t do this. For real. Sleep on it, maybe even delete that, and come back fresh in the morning, letting cooler heads prevail. Losing your temper with a user would make you look bad, even if it turns out you’re correct.