
Secret – Share anonymously with your friends. Speak freely - miloshadzic
https://www.secret.ly
======
ToastyMallows
"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](https://www.secret.ly/privacy)

~~~
dictum
> 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.

~~~
chrysb
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.

~~~
chaostheory
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

~~~
chrysb
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.

~~~
MrBra
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" ?

~~~
chrysb
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.

~~~
MrBra
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.

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

~~~
chrysb
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](https://medium.com/tech-talk/4791cf1fcf0e)

~~~
nulltype
Interesting. How do you compare salted hashed email addresses?

------
poulson
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.

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

------
dictum
"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!)

~~~
alcari
Jonathon Swift would also recommend children:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal)

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

------
incision
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.

------
quiqueqs
How is this different from Whisper?

~~~
chrysb
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.

------
peterwwillis
> it's about sharing, free of judgment.

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

------
hol
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).

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

~~~
seeingfurther
or a nice supportive message from a startup founder.

------
malgorithms
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?

~~~
mikeyouse
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.

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

------
frdgr
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...

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

~~~
dictum
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.

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

~~~
dfc
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"

------
DanHulton
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.)

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

Congratulations.

~~~
mikeyouse
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.

------
mikeyouse
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.

------
scrabble
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.

~~~
chrysb
Thanks scrabble. Glad you like it :)

------
jasonlotito
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.

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

------
ultimatedelman
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.

------
amjaeger
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...

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

~~~
chrysb
Is this still happening to you?

~~~
mariocarvalho
yes...

------
thebiglebrewski
Or I could just text them.

------
CompleteMoron2
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?

~~~
blueblob
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.

~~~
chrysb
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.

