Great product idea! I'm glad people find it useful.
Hypotheses:
> corporate VC that wanted to make a strategic investment
They want to put money in your company to make sure they don't have to compete with you or compete with someone else who might buy you down the line.
> They kept prodding around on the ML stuff, and how we might be able to use ML to accomplish roughly the same thing.
They're looking for secret sauce, barriers, friction. Something patentable. Something to keep others out and keep them ahead. Perhaps something that they don't think they can do themselves or maybe rip off when they realize it's useful. Remember Flux?[0]
They're investment thesis makes sense from this perspective: they're thinking like classic, amoral businesses.
Also note that if your product is simple and popular enough, people will likely make free clones. You'll need to be a good steward to keep your value.
Best of luck!
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A bit of feedback: you need to be more transparent and up front about what how and why you're using analytics, and let people opt-in. I was a bit disconcerted to see you using Google Analytics in your extension without informing me.
> you need to be more transparent and up front about what how and why you're using analytics
That's a new one to me. Is this Facebook changing the landscape right now, or have you been expecting this for a while? Do you have sites in mind that warn about GA?
Pretty much all websites use GA or something like it, and in my experience it's extremely rare to be warned about it. It always goes in the privacy policy, which you should be able to find. But I'm not sure I've ever seen an advance warning that analytics was taking place. I suppose it's assumed, but in any case appears to be normal and acceptable to not warn people that logging and searching of those logs exists.
Cookies are a different story, since the EU passed legislation requiring notice of their presence.
> They're looking for secret sauce, barriers, friction. Something patentable.
While that may be true, I'd suggest the VC's are just looking for a later exit when a greater fool buys them out. They're betting on the ML investment market getting hotter, and providing you meet the criteria of being a growing startup (by some metric) nominally in the ML field and that field attracts more investment dollars later - even whether or not you succeed as a bottom line business, or whether your business success comes from ML or not - doesn't necessarily matter.
Appreciate the feedback! Regarding analytics, I think this is some A/B testing, which I don't think is even active in the current version (though still in the sources).
More importantly, we don't tie GA or any other usage analytics to individual users. We basically just use it to see where the extension is used and where people are blacklisting sites. We use this data to make the extension run better on more sites. We don't monetize user data in any way. You're right that we should make this point more salient. In our Privacy Policy, we do describe how to opt out by blocking GA, but we should put this somewhere more prominent.
> You should make it opt in by default. Or stop doing it!
What? Can you post some examples of sites that already do this? Everybody has analytics on their landing pages, and I don't think I've ever personally seen an opt-in.
What you can find are thousands of examples of site policy pages that say something like: "by choosing to visit our site, you are sharing information with us that we log for the purposes of improving our customer experience. By using our service, you agree to this logging. If you don't want to be logged, then please don't use our service."
Google Analytics is already GDPR compliant, as long as:
* you are not pushing any unencrypted customer data to them in the clear
* you're careful regards who has access to your Google Analytics data
You can (and most businesses will) argue that you need to know how your website is used. It's a completely standard practice that doesn't put user privacy at risk. Moreover, Google has already offered an opt-out to Google Analytics globally, and you would be covered by that. As such, you don't need them to opt-in.
That's not the best analogy - it's more like someone has two chairs in their waiting room and they note which chair is more popular among people waiting, so they can replace the worse chair with a copy of the better one.
Except that this business saves money by allowing a representative of a third party to take the notes. The third party then notes down who sits in the chairs, follows them into the appointment and follows their client to the next business and do the same there.
We're totally open to making this opt-in. I'm curious how we should gather usage data, which some of our nonprofit funders require us to report for their impact questionnaire. How can we know how much the tools are being used if it's opt-in? Or are there other systems (other than Google) that raise fewer concerns?
I really appreciate all the candid advice in this thread and hope that we — and others in similar situations — can use it to improve our products.
A few other meandering thoughts, you'll need to be the one to figure out what makes sense.
- You're already not getting data from people with ad-blockers, consider also respecting Do Not Track[0]
- Be transparent about what you track and how it's used
- The data collected from opt-in users might end up being enough to build convincing enough reports for impact questionnaires?
- Your privacy policy seems confused: "We think the best way to ensure that your personal information stays safe is to never collect any in the first place" then "we only use Google Analytics, which gathers information about our site users and generates aggregate reports to help us figure out who is using our site and extensions, and in what ways"
Hypotheses:
> corporate VC that wanted to make a strategic investment
They want to put money in your company to make sure they don't have to compete with you or compete with someone else who might buy you down the line.
> They kept prodding around on the ML stuff, and how we might be able to use ML to accomplish roughly the same thing.
They're looking for secret sauce, barriers, friction. Something patentable. Something to keep others out and keep them ahead. Perhaps something that they don't think they can do themselves or maybe rip off when they realize it's useful. Remember Flux?[0]
They're investment thesis makes sense from this perspective: they're thinking like classic, amoral businesses.
Also note that if your product is simple and popular enough, people will likely make free clones. You'll need to be a good steward to keep your value.
Best of luck!
----
A bit of feedback: you need to be more transparent and up front about what how and why you're using analytics, and let people opt-in. I was a bit disconcerted to see you using Google Analytics in your extension without informing me.
[0]: https://justgetflux.com/news/2016/01/14/apple.html