How to build trust in a privacy-centric applications?
What do you recommend, how to build trust in a privacy-centric application?
- Anonymize data?
- Open sourcing the code?
- Self hosted version?
- E2E encryption?
Combination of them?
What else?
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All of those bullets sound good. Also, I believe that writing about those things in a transparent tone would go over well. In the space of analytics, Fathom's "data policy" accomplishes this well:
https://usefathom.com/data
That is a very good point!
Correct words and tone are mandatory in this area, but still, saying something is not enough. That is why I asked the question. I could say anything on a website, but doing nothing in real.
Here are some ideas I have day dreamed about related to privacy.
We are also working on the first 3 on our project "nostalgia"!
It's very essential since we are working on processing ALL people's private / GDPR data.
https://nostalgia-dev.github.io/
here's the open-source code:
https://github.com/nostalgia-dev/nostalgia
We believe that without open-source and self-hosting, it will be impossible to do this.
We actually do not send anything away yet, so have no need for E2E yet, but we were considering allowing to send anonimized insights (which we currently only anonymize for when we want to do a public stream on youtube).
You project looks awesome! Keep up the good work!
Open source is a big one when you want to build trust in the privacy community. With open-source it is possible to actually check and verify if whatever else you claim is true. Without being open-source you can claim things but people won't actually know if they are true.
Otherwise you build trust by being open and communicative, listen to feedback, answer questions...
Open-sourcing is always a good way to build trust, but what if at the end of the day, I would like to make a profitable business of it? Provide a self-hosted (free) & cloud-hosted (paid) version?
What do you think?
That's certainly one way of doing it. And in general, remember that open source doesn't necessary mean free as in beer. There is a market of people that are happy to pay for open source solutions especially in this day and age of privacy intrusive apps etc.
Having 2 & 4 definitely helps a lot. We were wondering the same for our applications and went ahead with #2. Currently working on #4
Not so sure about the Self hosted version option, As I believe it helps if the project is open source and has E2E Encryption.
Yes, it definitely helps a lot. Thanks!