[csallen]

Erodes what trust exactly?

You're assuming 37signals made an agreement ("we won't be able to see your filenames in our logs") that they intentionally never made, and then you're claiming they violated said non-existent agreement.

If you're a company with super-sensitive data then it's on YOU to choose the appropriate place to store that data. There are services made explicitly for that sort of thing. It's absolutely ridiculous and irresponsible to require a certain level of privacy features, sign up for a service that doesn't have those privacy features, and then act as if they violated your trust.

[sunchild]

Actually, I agree with you. 37Signals is characteristically up-front in their security policy about not being an appropriate solution for sensitive data. That's why I don't use them for my own client work. I respect their decision not to take on that responsibility.

Having said that, their security policy does suggest that customers expect some level of privacy. It's just bad form to publicly announce that you've been poking around the content of customer data as part of a fun blog post about metrics.

Nobody is building classified weapons on Basecamp. If you say that Basecamp customers shouldn't expect any measure of privacy, I'll respectfully acknowledge that you might be correct about that.

[csallen]

> That's why I don't use them for my own client work. I respect their decision not to take on that responsibility

I respect that viewpoint immensely, and I wish more people would think like that.

I think the main issue here is that the words "privacy" and "security" are so vague as to be meaningless. Consequently, people have mapped their own personal definitions on to them. For example, different people may care about different subsets of the following:

- Do you use SSL when I transfer sensitive data to your servers? - How secure is your database? What do you use to protect stored data from hackers? - Do you share user data with third-parties? If so, do you anonymize it? - Do you prevent your own employees from accessing my data? - Do you have an SLA that guarantees I will be able to access my data the vast majority of the time? - Do you have measures in place to ensure my data is never accidentally deleted?

Etc. The list could go on and on. If the customer is worried about any of the above (and sadly, most aren't), then she's in luck, because privacy policies and company email addresses are usually a click away on the web. I doubt I know anyone familiar with all the privacy and security processes employed by banks, doctors, financial aid offices, etc. Which is why it's confusing to see so many technically-savvy people up in arms about the name of a jpg file.