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8 Comments

Do you value privacy in a product?

Wondering if people/companies choose certain products because they are privacy safe?

on June 11, 2020
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    I hope so, I'm offering Portabella, an end-to-end encrypted project management platform.

    In general I think the need for privacy preserving tools is growing everyday. We see that with the explosion in popularity of products like Matrix/Riot, Signal and Jitsi. Even Zoom, despite their shortcomings, did a lot for public knowledge of e2ee with their announcement recently.

    I know that there are a few Indie Hackers along with myself focusing on privacy preserving tools, the guys behind Plausible and BlockSurvey frequent this site.

    I've been in the privacy space for a few years now and the desire is definitely there for these products, I guess it will take a little while for it to go mainstream is all.

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      I agree with this. I think the appreciation is growing, but in specific industries the set of regulations really demands it.

  2. 1

    People yes certainly do. Companies I'm not as sure maybe someone in their legal or compliance department might.

    I might be on the more extreme end of things as a person who compartmentalizes all web browsing activities into individual virtual machines each with outbound proxies limiting domains that can be loaded. But I do pay for things, but largely not products just raw materials (vms rather than a VPN for example). But I avoid even using things that don't have decent privacy and security properties.

    The trick I think is finding the people who would like privacy but don't build everything from scratch. Hackers are cheap and will think they can build it better. Good luck!

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    You know someone cares about privacy when they spend money to secure it, whether it's abandoning free email or getting a VPN.

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    Wow nice comments and products, thanks.

    Think promoting privacy on the product, you automatically be more transparant about what is privacy safe is. What does your product do different.

    I mostly see technical terms thrown at them, such as End2End encryption, anonymous tracking, etc.. Will less technical language attract more customers?

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    I do. I don't want to use RescueTime because of that, for example. If I can own my data, I'm way, way happier.

  6. 1

    Yes! But I'm also building Letterbase, which is a privacy-friendly customer support messenger, so it's kind of important that I use privacy-friendly tools as well :)

    In my opinion, there's a growing trend of users caring more and more about privacy. There are a lot more privacy-friendly products coming out now, and I believe that people are starting to use it as more of a criterion for choosing products instead of looking solely at the price or at features.

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    I do.

    It's certainly not the only factor I take into account when choosing a product, but a bonus point nonetheless.

    Now, there's a world of difference between "caring" about privacy (while loading dozens of third-party trackers), and truly caring about privacy. Actions speak louder than words.