Comment by karaterobot

When I was a contractor, I worked on a project with this well-intended guy who wanted to make an app for people to store a persistent map of their movement over time using the GPS. On day one, he made it very clear—and I believed him—that a user's private data was sacrosanct. As the project wore on, never finding traction, and costing more and more money, I remember one of the last meetings I attended with him. He was trying to find new sources of revenue to keep the company alive, and he uttered the inevitable phrase: "well, we've got all this user data we could sell." That was one of those moments when you get a little more cynical, and since then I access as an axiom that every company will sell my data eventually, regardless of their promises. It's just a question of limiting their access to it, and being willing to switch to an alternative every once in a while.