
Ask HN: Is Beanstack evil? - MilnerRoute
Children are lured to a web site to tell a third party what library books they&#x27;re reading.  All the data is mined.  It promises to give children &quot;recommendations.&quot;  One of the company&#x27;s founders came from Google.  Amazon gets involved -- dispensing notifications from Echo devices to children about when it&#x27;s time to resume reading a specific book.<p>Beanstack&#x27;s privacy policy reveals they &quot;use IP addresses and session identifiers to analyze trends,&quot; as well as &quot;to track user activities, to infer user interests, and to otherwise induce, deduce, and gather information.&quot;  It also specifically states that they ignore &quot;Do not track&quot; signals.<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.beanstack.com&#x2F;privacy<p>That&#x27;s what my local public library is touting now.  (Public libraries are now promoting this -- and are, in fact, paying the third party for it.)  BeanStack refers to public libraries as &quot;clients,&quot; while bragging on their site that &quot;Our personalized recommendation system remains part of our secret sauce.&quot;  Mark Cuban invested after hearing their pitch on Shark  Tank -- BeanStack is a product of ZooBean.  But it was founded six years ago -- before parents were concerned with privacy and tracking.<p>The privacy policy seems to say they&#x27;re only using this data  to provide the service.  (And though they&#x27;re a for-profit service, their business model seems to just be collecting money from schools and public libraries that want to outsource their summer reading program to a company that can add online and app components.)  I don&#x27;t want to be the grinch who killed children&#x27;s reading programs at my local library.   Am I being over-sensitive -- or is there something here to be concerned about.<p>They say their goal is to encourage children to spend less time online -- yet the children are encouraged to go online to tell BeanStack what book&#x27;s they&#x27;re reading.    (Because otherwise how else could you obtain and mine their data?)
======
MilnerRoute
Maybe I'm concerned about the meta message. Is it:

\- Recommendations make reading more fun, thus encouraging children to read.

\- Recommendations teach children to let faceless data-mining companies track
them, and to tell them what they should like and which books they should be
reading next.

------
RodgerTheGreat
Seems pretty nasty to me.

Algorithmic "recommendations" are at best a questionable value-add to users,
and they are routinely used as a justification for gathering and correlating
personal information. The disclosure agreement is also conveniently vague and
full of exploitable holes. Par for the course.

Dragging children into the surveillance-capitalism meatgrinder is especially
gross. Don't make business models like this.

