
Monica – Personal CRM, Remember everything about friends and family - donkoz_ab
https://github.com/monicahq/monica
======
codechoir
I really like the idea and I did something similar with regular note-taking
apps. The thing that would be a game-changer for me would be to link up my
social/messaging/email accounts in order to (automatically) update information
about when I last talked/chatted/interacted with someone.

Yes, it somewhat goes against the principle of absolute privacy, but I
wouldn't mind the feature on my own server.

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kevingrahl
> Chandler is Monica's official mobile app.

Alright, I’m sold..

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projectramo
I’ve been looking for something like this for a long time.

I think it _has_ to have automated capture. Get everything from email account,
text messages and the calendar to fill out the relationship.

~~~
robinhood
Founder of Monica here. Nope. Reading from an email account is absolutely out
of the question - it's way too invasive in my opinion.

I know someone in the community is writing importers from several sources of
data (Telegram, for instance).

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vohk
Interesting. That fills a niche that's been empty for me since I left
Facebook, and I love that it's open source and can be self hosted.

The pricing for the hosted version seems a little steep though, especially for
something based entirely on manual input. At $5/month that's about half of
what I pay for office/onedrive, and more than I pay for 1password. That's a
big ask for a service that falls more into the 'neat' category.

~~~
Vinnl
Huh, I created an account with one of the earlier Show HN posts, and I quite
like it. I don't think back then there were pricing strategies yet, though,
nor limits on the amount of contacts you could add. I hope he'll either
grandfather in existing users - though I guess that since there's at least the
option to export you data, being able to self-host is already quite an
improvement.

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stockkid
I like that it is open source and I can self-host. Were there any security
concerns for open sourcing the project? And what makes you choose AGPLv3?

~~~
Mononokay
To speculate: the AGPL is the most common license that keeps to the _spirit_
of free software when it comes to licensing for anything that could possibly
be used in a web-facing product. If they didn't use it, it's likely that
someone would have made a company profiting off of their work by now.

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robla
I'm looking for systems that have Orgmode compatibility, since some really
cool personal PIM apps _that don 't require emacs_ are starting to gain
traction. Orgzly, for example, is a really good hierarchical notetaker mobile
app. The orgmode-compatible tools still have some rough edges, but the
usability issues look solvable. Does Monica have any sort of Orgmode support?

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tmchow
I personally use FullContact for this purpose with custom fields and notes. I
love that it syncs with my contacts on iOS and google.

~~~
kevingrahl
You should be aware that FullContact is known to sell customers data.

I didn’t know that either and have tried the iOS App once but did not upload
anything to them, I just wanted to see what the App could do/how it feels
like. Then I read their Privacy Police and ToS and did some searching. I very
quickly decided that this is not a service I’d want to use.

So I send them a GDPR request demanding the deletion of my account and all
associated data. They replied back that I had to use their ‘Privacy Center’ to
do that myself. Horrible site, let me tell you.. Anyways, I noticed that in
their Privacy Policy they state that they won’t delete your data even if you
request that. They’ll just flag it as blocked. So in theory once you upload
something to FullContact you have no chance of getting it off of their
servers. They claim that this is to ‘protect you’ and to ‘ensure that your
data won’t accidentally land back on their system’ somehow.

I had to send them a _very_ stern email threatening legal action and
mentioning some personal contacts I have to some federal law enforcement
officer who works privacy cases to even get an answer that was more than
‘please use our privacy center to delete your data/account’.

Finally I got back some generic email stating that all my data was deleted.
Some canned response thing though. I highly suspect that they still have my
data on their system.

I highly suggest not to use the service of FullContact!

~~~
fredsted
Seems like it would be interesting to report them for a violation of GDPR.
They’re a good example of a company that should be zealously compliant.

~~~
kevingrahl
Oh for sure, there’s no way I wouldn’t report them for all the hurdles they
threw at me trying to not accept my GDPR request. I only received the account
deletion confirmation email on Friday though so I still have to write that all
up and I don’t even know yet where I’m supposed to send my complaint to. But
I’ll figure that out.

~~~
zmix
> I don’t even know yet where I’m supposed to send my complaint to.

Start here? ;-)

>> mentioning some personal contacts I have to some federal law enforcement
officer who works privacy cases

~~~
kevingrahl
I could do that but I thought there’d be someone who I’m supposed to send GDPR
complaint to. I haven’t looked into this at all yet I just remember there was
some mention of some supervisory agency or something like that in the GDPR
which I read several months ago.

~~~
schoen
I believe it's normally enforced by the privacy regulator of each individual
EU member country, e.g. the BfDI in Germany.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_data_protection_autho...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_data_protection_authority#Europe)

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dang
Two procedural issues:

(1) "Show HN" is for projects that are the submitter's personal work. It
doesn't look like this is the case here. The rules are at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html).

(2) This account is part of a ring of abusive accounts that we banned a while
ago, which is why the post was killed on submission and had to be vouched for
by users. Generally that's a good thing, but this case wasn't so obvious.

All: using sockpuppet accounts to vote and comment on HN will eventually get
all your accounts and sites banned on HN, so please just don't. (Just for
clarity, there's no reason to think that the creator of this project had
anything to do with this.)

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webdva
How kind of you to have made such a thing. It can be useful for people with
memory problems.

How inspiring.

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rubatuga
Tried using this, but I never stuck to it. I think just using a text file with
peoples names might be easier.

------
5_minutes
I’ve been pondering about a solution for this as well. Personal CRM, what a
great idea I thought to myself.

Just even to remember all parents and kids names of the people I meet through
my own 2 kids; at school, soccer,... it’s be great if there was a mature app
for that

But it’d need an mobile app too.

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cyphunk
I would like to use this product but it feels irresponsible to do so. Why are
we still making technology that stores such personal information without data
being encrypted end-2-end?

~~~
robinhood
1\. Do you want to be able to search your data? Full encryption would make it
impossible. 2\. This is why it's open source. If you need full privacy,
download it and run it yourself.

~~~
cyphunk
This could be a tradeoff. But also, I have full disk encryption and an index I
can search that is itself encrypted. Eventually doing this over internet wires
will not be an issue, and may not be much of an issue for many already.

To your second point: indeed this could be run locally instead, if one is that
concerned about storing sensitive information online

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thunfisch
Would have loved to try this (I know hundreds of people, but I only interact
with them every few months), but this is unnecessarily hard to install. I
would have to change my webserver config just to run this, which seems really
strange for a PHP application... And I'm a sysadmin! Not sure if I want to
deal with this in the long term, if even installing it is a pain.

~~~
fredsted
What specifically seems strange to you? Reading the Ubuntu docs, seems pretty
reasonable, although they could’ve made a prepackaged version with composer
dependencies.

~~~
tenryuu
This would have been great. I've been tackling composer for a long time on a
windows installation. Meanwhile something like PHP-my-admin has zero problems
with releasing with dependencies in tack

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marpstar
previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14497295](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14497295)

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Tomte
Sure, this is a great submission to flag! (And why can't I vouch for it?)

HN is very frustrating when people flag articles not for their content, but
for stupid reasons.

I assume it's because of the gender discussion below. Maybe you should flag
the comments you dislike, instead of a perfectly fine Show HN?

~~~
y4mi
i didn't flag it myself, but its not compliant to the rules, afaict.

its been posted one year ago[1] and the rules[0] clearly state that it should
not be posted again, unless a major overhaul has been done

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14497295](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14497295)

~~~
detaro
Reposts are explicitly ok after one year. (EDIT: removed wrong statement about
being a show hn...)

~~~
y4mi

        Show HN: Monica, an open-source CRM to manage friends and family (monicahq.com)
        1097 points by robinhood on June 6, 2017 | hide | past | web | favorite | 572 comments
    

how is _that_ not a show hn?

and there is no mention about that one year clause on the rules page. it
should be added if thats the case.

~~~
detaro
> _how is that not a show hn?_

Whops, my mistake, missed that (I had looked for other submissions earlier and
just seen your link as "visited" and misremembered). The one year rule is in
the general HN FAQ.

