Comment by neilv
6 days ago
> Too many companies take a mile when you give an inch and take advantage of ambiguity. [paragraph break] The SDK simply doesn’t exist as a product any more and so doesn’t make sense to keep on our website as an offering.
Would you say that you had an epiphany about respecting privacy, after earlier dabbling in intimate surveillance capitalism, and are now firmly committed to privacy?
If so, have you found a way to lock in that commitment?
For example, some kind of contractual assurance, which can't be revoked by the usual "we've updated our privacy policy" (such as might accompany a leadership change, or change of heart), and which effectively survives any merger/acquisition or sale of assets?
(Of course, even with that in place, technologically, a new version of an app could be pushed that irrevocably violates all the users' privacy, in a matter of hours. But at least then, the company, executives, and owners might be sued into oblivion, and even face criminal charges in various jurisdictions.)
Good question. I'm realizing I did not really communicate this well.
The full story is that we went to a conference for biohacking, spreading the word about Reflect, and businesses wanted to white label the product so that they could have the same capabilities but for their own niches.
Those businesses wanted to be able to do things like create surveys using our form building library and have users collect their own data for things like N=1 experiments with their products.
What those businesses wanted to use that functionality for was up to them and their privacy policies, but the terms we talked about were something similar to "you can't use our SDK without users explicitly opting into any data collection". We never ended up actually licensing the SDK or making any deals with any companies.
Hope that makes things a little clearer. As far as Reflect the app, that was started from the beginning with privacy in mind and local-first. I have a long blog post I've been sitting on explaining the whole story, which I will publish soon hopefully, but I've been revolted by surveillance capitalism for a long time and originally made Reflect to help my partner get off of using google forms for tracking mood.
You have a good point regarding the privacy policy. We haven't found a way to lock in that commitment, and that's obviously not ideal from a user's perspective. People do place trust in Reflect not to pull the rug out from under them.