

The Disconnected Niche - reso
http://blog.garethmacleod.com/the-disconnected-niche

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rednaught
A consortium or whatnot of startup(or existing) companies might be an
interesting way to both announce/broadcast their services/products and also
create a standard privacy/user-data policy. Any ideas? Work towards common
goals:

-Privacy by default, sharing only by opt-in.

-Advertising (if necessary)is done in a manner that demographics are shared with advertisers in some standard structure/tiering of individual data that is entirely up to the user to decide comfort level(e.g. complete privacy - higher SAAS prices or give up a high amount of privacy - lower priced or almost free SAAS).

-No externally hosted services(js-based offerings such as analytics, customer support, surveys, etc.) or if using a third party offering disclose who it is and only work those who also are members of the consortium.

-Disclose infrastructure and back-end(non-visible)/external processing companies that are used to operate the service.

-Agree that you won't pull a "Spotify" where user's data might be handed over to another company "after the fact." Announce changes like acquisitions or partnerships such that a change in access to user-data requires 30/60 days notice.

-Allow permanent deletion of accounts and information, not toggling columns in a database to hide visibility.

-Announce what details are captured regarding the user and make the entirety of that available for download in a common format.

Re-reading this I must sound paranoid but I've always considered myself
moderate compared to Stallman. Am I the only one concerned with "acceptable"
privacy these days?

~~~
true_religion
If its a paid service, some of what you say may be reasonable.

But for an money-free service, part of the price you pay ought to be the data
you provide the service.

~~~
andrewcooke
ought? so it's no longer "one possible way to make things work out
financially", but a moral duty?

jeez.

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jwhitlark
As someone in that demographic, I must agree. My problem isn't paying for
services, it's finding services that do what I want in a way I can trust. If
someone came up with a way to do many of the things I need, with a "privacy
circuit breaker " that they can't revoke, I'd shovel money at them.

~~~
reso
So... what do you need?

~~~
jwhitlark
Dropbox, Github, Google Apps for your domain, blogging, financial services and
bill pay, photo + music + text + media storage and playback. Just off the top
of my head.

I don't want fully self-hosted services, any more than I want fully online
services. I want a sandboxed, personal subset of the service that I can add to
a physical box I own or a virtual box I rent from a provider. I don't expect a
company to give me everything to run on my own hardware, but I want a solution
that can take the provider going under, being bought, etc. without tanking the
service and having to worry about my stuff ending up auctioned off to the
highest bidder.

The N2N project <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N2n> is an interesting place to
start. I started work of some code to do something like what I'm talking
about, but that was before my day job ate my life.
<https://github.com/jwhitlark/unum>

I guess the question is can we come up with a system that defines sort of a
DMZ between a person and a service, something more than the current all or
nothing model.

EDIT: Note that I'm not disparaging Dropbox, Github, etc. They've been quite
good so far, and I'm happy to pay. I trust them, to a certain extent, it's
just that I shouldn't have to trust them. Isn't there some way that we can
meet in the middle?

~~~
Wilduck
I would love something like this. Ideally, I would want something that stores
all of the content in a single file/folder/partition (I don't care which) and
will not render my data inaccessible if I simply copy/mirror it somewhere
else.

From that point, I imagine a company having an open protocol for accessing my
music/pictures/blog posts, and then selling the best client using this
protocol.

Really, the key for me is less about absolute privacy, but more about the
ability to extremely easily take my data and run.

~~~
jwhitlark
I'm not sure data portability is enough these days. I also need some minimum
functionality to remain in the event of a dispute or service shutdown.

In the real world, escrow (sort of) fills this need. Perhaps a hybrid
Amazon/Heroku that also acted as an escrow agent? Enforcing that apps/services
followed the data access rules and made sure that the service would keep
running on that instance, even if the company went under? I'd pay extra (up
front) for that.

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garethsprice
Is it a niche though? Like the old Tolstoy quote "Happy families are all
alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" - are happy consumers
alike in the same way, but are the disconnected all unhappy in their own way?

There are plenty of techniques and products for the disconnected, but few of
them ever gain wide traction - possibly because if a problem gets large
enough, the market changes to reflect mainstream needs (eg. Facebook pulling
Beacon when outrage became widespread).

~~~
jodrellblank
Mangling Robin Hanson's [http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/08/reliability-
theory.htm...](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/08/reliability-theory.html)
post, happy users have features they use which do what they want well enough
and possibly features they ignore, wheras unhappy people have one or more
feature which aren't doing what they want, or are missing. But which specific
features aren't doing what they want will differ from person to person.

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100k
Ironically(?) this site uses the following tracking cookies according to
Ghostery: Facebook Connect, Google Analytics, MixPanel, Quancast, Twitter
Button.

As you might tell by the fact that I've got Ghostery installed, I am sort of
in this niche, but I would consider myself wishy-washy. I don't like Facebook
tracking my logins all over the web, but I use Google Analytics myself so I
don't have a big problem with another site using it.

~~~
alanh
Yeah, well, it’s a Posterous blog. That’s the deal: You get a free blog, but
they track you, blur your text, and overlay a shitty semi-transparent ad over
the bottom 16 pixels.

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y0ghur7_xxx
I am such a person. You completely got me! But it's difficult to target ads at
me, I adblock, because I don't want to be tracked.

And, to the DDG example, I would add Funambol¹, one of a very few Italian
startups.

¹<https://www.forge.funambol.org/>

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frenchieee
Interesting point. It's been a long while since I've met someone who shied
away from Facebook, (at least for that reason), but refusing to be tracked by
Google seems more common. I don't suppose you are one of these people?

~~~
calebmpeterson
I stay a mile away from FB due to their lack of respect for privacy. I'm
selective about Google (Gmail=yes, search history and Plus=no)

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stfu
Absolutely agree. There is definitely a market for anonymity based products.
I'm paying each month the same amount of money that I shill out for my
internet access to services that increase anonymity (cascaded VPNs, etc.).

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diminish
I wish there was an anonymous-browsing/app fork of Android for smart phones
and tablets; kind of a full private mode. this way i would be able to navigate
without fear of any tracking.

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suivix
Any sites that try to fill the disconnected niche will inherently limit their
capabilities, which is amusing since it caters to the tech-crowd.

