Secret – Share anonymously with your friends. Speak freely | Hacker News Reader

Secret – Share anonymously with your friends. Speak freely

secret.ly

39 pointsmiloshadzic57 comments

"This information is solely used by us for debugging and analytical purposes (e.g., to enhance the Service) .... We log information about your use of the Service, including the type of browser you use, access times, pages viewed, your IP address and the page you visited before navigating to our Service. .... We collect information about the mobile device you use to access our Service, including the hardware model, operating system and version, unique device identifiers and mobile network information. .... We may collect information about the location of your device each time you access or use one of our mobile applications or otherwise consent to the collection of this information. ...."

From: https://www.secret.ly/privacy

> unique device identifiers and mobile network information

I always wonder why. Can't you just attach any retargeting/personalization/whatever to the logged-in account? There's no need to know exactly which device I'm using, aside maybe from model and OS version.

Hi, I'm one of the founders. We use unique device identifiers, which you can reset yourself on iOS, to help ensure account security. For example, when you log in from a new device.

If the whole point is being anonymous, is account security important since I'd just rather make a new account instead?

Is this the real reason you need device ids?

> Secret’s concept looks fairly simple at first: Based on the contacts in your mobile phonebook, you’re plugged into a network without establishing an identity or even a static username up front, and asked to share any and everything to that network. While initially you’re only communicating with friends, those secrets slowly trickle out to others depending on whether or not your friends have interacted with your posts.

I'm not sure what to think about this. It sounds more like your app is game of "guess who this secret belongs to". While this is interesting (especially for everyone in college and younger), I feel that you guys need to change your marketing to better reflect reality. of course I could be completely wrong since hn is no longer the demographic for this type of app

We think it's important to notify users when someone from a different device tries to log into your account. We will, to the best of our ability, make secrets untraceable. I can promise you that.

So are you saying that if it was a regular website accessible from a desktop pc you would check against MAC address or some other hardware id to "notify users when someone from a different device tries to log into their account" ?

Most high-security sites do this (including banks, and even Facebook) to let you know when there's unusual activity. In order to recognize the anomalies, you need data. The meta point in our privacy policy is to be transparent about what data we retain and why.

We appreciate the probing questions, as we want to be as clear as possible about what, why, and how we're building Secret.

yes but banks and facebook aren't all about anonymized message posts. it's implicitly understood that they're keeping track of transactions and psuedo public posts respectively

Your kinda biting your own tail here, and this is soo revealing..

Facebook and banks do that because they are built with everything but anonymity in their mind, while instead your primary objective as your slogan says is "Share anonymously with your friends. Speak freely."

You care not about real anonymity, you just care about selling the concept behind it, giving a false sense of safety, just to profit from that, riding on the wings of the need from IT uneducated people to protect themselves now that the alarmism is very high given to what we understood about NSA.

Or, is it just profit? Maybe it would be a smart move from NSA to affileate with enterprises creating such fakely anonymous services..

But really? I just guess it's all about profiting on the need for anonymity gone wrong.

In other words, it's not different nor more secretive (likely less) than any other platform for sharing ideas out there.

What would be interesting is an application that does not log and keep track of the user's identity (this obviously does), one that runs on a similar "no-log" infrastructure, and whose code is open source and readily available for auditing.

For an app that has anonymity as its big feature, it lost me at "give me your phone number".

You don't need to give it, it's just an easy way to deliver it to your phone.

It's only secret-from-your-friends. Actually, secret from your friends if they can't identify your writing style and personal idiosincrasies, and if your friends don't happen to include people in the SF startup scene that are friends with anyone at Secret Inc.

Hi, I'm one of the founders. We ask for your phone number to connect you with your friends. We also encrypt unique identifiers so that your friends, nor us, can ever read your content.

Read about our stance on using address books here: https://medium.com/tech-talk/4791cf1fcf0e

Interesting. How do you compare salted hashed email addresses?

I would say they lost me even before that, the website won't even load without javascript.

Besides if they can't even have a website that are not tracking me and sharing my info with 3d parties (i.e. Google-analytics, Cloudfont, and Amazon Web Services), how could I ever trust their product/app?

Imagine how misleading advertisements can be on this platform: since your friends won't be explicitly attaching their names to their posts, you would never know if something was inserted by an advertiser.

We annotate each post with "Friend" when it comes from someone in your contacts. We will NEVER misrepresent that.

"My cat only eats cuts of Wagyu beef. It is costing me a fortune. What do I do?"

This is satire of course, but for a brief moment it made me reverse my stance on the SF Google shuttles/rent price thing. And you know—sometimes behind satire there's the memory of someone who actually said something to that effect.

(If anyone actually has this question: feed a homeless person. Oh, I don't mean give food to a homeless person, I mean, cut a homeless person into thin slices and season it to your cat's taste. Dickens would recommend using the children of the homeless. Who ever said humans shouldn't be eaten? Disruption!)

Jonathon Swift would also recommend children: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal

As soon as I rant about Obama, all my friends will know exactly who I am.

Interesting. I came up with precisely this during a "social app for the masses" thought experiment. Inspirations were the positives I've observed with anonymous commenting systems and the "secrets" pages I think I first saw in the local City Paper.

Follow-up thoughts were:

- What percentage of users would simply take it as an opportunity to be anonymously nasty to each other?

- In larger sharing circles, would users take to using "tripcode" type images or signatures in their shares to actually fight anonymity.

- How do you actually monetize such a service? As a deeper source of sentiment? A window into the things people want/think, but won't demonstrate publicly?

- If sharing user produced text, how anonymous could it actually be? Speech patterns, capitalization, punctuation and whatnot is all very telling. It would be an interesting application of NLP to anonymize those tidbits without changing their meaning.

How is this different from Whisper?

Hi, I'm one of the founders. The key differentiator is that you're sharing with the people you know. Secret allows you to have interesting conversations, anonymously, with your friends. On Whisper, you're doing this with strangers. They both have their own benefits.

> it's about sharing, free of judgment.

And i'll bet you most of the things shared are judgmental.

Been using this for a while. I love the app, the idea, the community - I feel like it's somewhere online where I can actually be myself, instead of worrying about managing my public profile (Facebook/Twitter).

This sounds like a marketing message from the company that created the app.

or a nice supportive message from a startup founder.

This is genuinely what I think as a user. For example, I quite frequently write a tweet and then delete it because I have second thoughts about whether I want to be associated to it.

Quick tip: I really wanted to try this app, but I didn't trust it to "find my friends", i.e., read my contacts. At first it seems you can't skip that step, but I force quit the app when it showed me the "find my friends" screen, and when I started it back up, it didn't show me the screen again.

Does anyone know if it spams your address book?

I signed up this morning with my phone number, and it didn't spam anyone (that I'm aware of).

The way it forms its 'secret' networks is similar to LinkedIn's degree system. Your phone contacts are your 'First Degree' connections, their contacts are your 'Second Degree' connections, etc.

Most posts from 2nd or 3rd tier connections never appear on your feed, it's only the popular ones that show up. It's interesting since you really have no idea who you're interacting with.

Disclaimer: I really have no idea how it all works, that's just my impression after a few hours of use.

Hi, I'm one of the founders. Your description is just about spot on. :-)

Interesting idea! I don't see a direct analogy with how we communicate in the real world. So I wonder what use will emerge for that medium. Network sentiments?

Anonymity will be relative to how unique your behavior is among your address book contacts. Might become an awesome tool to educate people about the difficulty of anonymizing content...

Definitely an interesting trend emerging here, with lots of different players entering the space. http://whisper.sh/ raised a $21M series B, and http://www.500strangers.com also recently launched.

Seems like this kind of thing would have extremely low lock-in. All the usual mechanisms for that are invalid in this case.

This will come off very elitist, but these popular image-based self-expression venues like Reddit image macros, the pictures on whisper.sh and the inspirational/life lesson pictures people share on Facebook all the way back to MySpace blingee have a weird kitschy thing going. I should coin a neologism for it.

Whisper is like PostSecret without the irony and users over the age of 22. Part of me wants to get all haughty and say there's no way they need 21M, and the other part wants to get all haughty and say they need 1B, because people will get all over this stuff for this faux-honest emo 2.0 is how people really feel behind the layers of irony and spectacle.

I cringed when corporations started adopting sarcasm and slang to fit in on Twitter and FB, but now I cringe when I see companies using this kitschy-intimate-bitchy-tumblr style.

Not available on the Belgian iTunes store. That's stupid as there is no good reason for the omission.

Don't feel singled out, it is not just the Belgian store. If you dont allow JS by default you see some text that says: "Enter a valid US phone number"

Didn't find it in the Brazillian store either ):

It's US only for now. Follow @getsecret on Twitter to find out when it's available elsewhere.

So anonymous vaguebooking? Not for me, I get enough of that on Facebook where there's actually an identity to semi restrain people.

(May totally be for you, of course, I'm not value judging here. Just... I am absolutely not the target market here, I think.)

Anonymous, free speak and freedom. While supporting Libya government buying .ly domains.

Congratulations.

What an irrelevant post. I'm sure the $75 they spent on their domain name is critical to the Muslim Brotherhood's attempts to brainwash the west. Or something.

I've been using it all morning and I'm a big fan. It's proven to be very therapeutic with work complaints / fears. I just hope it doesn't get overrun with trolls and attention-whores.

I like this idea so much that I built something very similar for the web two months ago. It's out there, but I never officially launched it.

App looks great, and the idea is great. Good stuff.

Thanks scrabble. Glad you like it :)

So, a site that shows alerts on it's home page with regard to SSL certs that talks about being secret, anonymous, isn't really encouraging.

That was caused by a bad link in the recode article. The journalist fixed it.

cool idea. looks well done. i can't keep thinking that the only thing i would read on here would be confession bear quotes, though.

looks really cool, hope that it doesnt turn into the "anonymous confessions fb pages" where people submit posts through a google survey thing, and the get reposted by the admin. those are all fake...

Something wrent wrong saying on sign up... Is it down?

Is this still happening to you?

yes...

Or I could just text them.

So you guys do realize that all the data that goes across the AT&T network and other carriers are all monitored and that packets are tagged with info that goes back to your GSM or CDMA network entrypoint with a new ID.

This isnt how to make an anonymous secure network for sharing. It only obscufates it for those who are poor at tracking you or companies that mine your public data for sale - although technically that anonymous nature still doesnt work unless everyone uses the network. If your sister is still on a public social network and posts photos of you , or references to your job - you will still be mined.

So that said. Whats up?

I don't think this is the place that you would send your criminal plans and ideas, I think that it is a place where you can discuss things that might be embarrassing or get more objective opinions. There is still the potential problem that one of your contacts has no other contacts and can therefore guess pretty accurately whether it is you or not. There is also quite a bit of research on de-anonymizing social networks that might make this less private than some might think.

Hi, I'm one of the founders. You said it exactly right – this is a place to share openly and honestly with your friends about day to day things and sentiments, and not for crime or other illegal activity.

That being said, we also have implemented a number of measures to prevent triangulation. For example, your friends' secrets will remain hidden until you have enough friends on the network. You can't just sign up with one contact, that won't work.

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