[stephenhuey]

I have long wondered about the market size for privacy-focused apps. Sure, plenty of people don't know or don't care to value that, but if there are enough, maybe you could have a whole set of apps that emphasize they are not seeking world domination or selling out to the highest bidder, and a major selling point for using them would be that they are not < your expected chat/dating/photo/social site >.

Am I too idealistic? If such apps are not aggressively seeking hyper growth, it seems like these more trustworthy services could be deployed to cheap servers and let people use them for cheap without having to resort to selling user data.

[JohnFen]

> I have long wondered about the market size for privacy-focused apps.

The real problem is how to trust that a "privacy-focused" app is actually privacy-focused. You certainly can't take the publisher's word for it.

The only safe stance is to withhold as much personal information from as much software and services as possible.

[pesus]

Even if they were initially trustworthy, it's surely only a matter of time before they start wanting/needing to make (more) money and start abandoning their principles in pursuit of profit.

[neuralRiot]

Or the company is sold to a big corp that doesn’t give a dammn about or privacy or one whose goal is to actually get the data.

[OkayPhysicist]

If a company wanted to, they absolutely could include something along the lines of "If we violate the terms of this privacy policy, we owe all affected users $1000" in their Terms of Service. Pointing a gun at their own head to prove that they're serious. Companies don't do this, because they are cowards.

[andy99]

That is gimmicky and would be an extremely low trust signal.

[OkayPhysicist]

How is that a low trust signal? It's grounds to sue. Crank the number up to the limit of small claims in whatever jurisdiction you're based in.

If it was legal to say "If I break this oath, you can fucking shoot me" in a contract, I'd suggest that. The entire point of the exercise is "we promise do the right thing, and to keep us honest we have set up a system by which you can destroy us if we violate that promise".

Corporations can't swear on their life, as they have no life to offer. They can swear on their cash, and by such their ongoing existence.

[asveikau]

> The real problem is how to trust that a "privacy-focused" app is actually privacy-focused

I think the real problem is actually that legislative bodies will make privacy focused apps illegal. California AB 1043 is an example of what can happen.

[kube-system]

This is a multi-axis problem.

On one spectrum, you have privacy -- at one extreme, the most private of people don't even use social apps, they are traditionally private people. At the other extreme, you have the highest consumers of apps -- the people who demand sharing the most.

On the other spectrum, you have technical acuity -- at one extreme you have people who can audit software they use and verify that it actually does what it says -- at the other extreme, you have people who have no clue and will believe whatever is convincing.

Given this, the market for "app that enables sharing, but has privacy controls, and is verifiably so" is a tiny circle somewhere in the middle of this grid.

[JohnFen]

> at one extreme you have people who can audit software they use and verify that it actually does what it says

Unless the software sends data off to the cloud or a sever somewhere. You can't audit what happens there.

[kube-system]

I was referring to the acuity of potential users, who like you, would be able to identify that.

[nonameiguess]

Not privacy-focused, but OKCupid itself fit many of your requirements when it first came out. It wasn't aggressively seeking hyper growth and barely marketed outside of existing SparkNotes and SparkMatch users. It was just a few math nerds at Harvard that wanted to model human romantic compatibility by categorizing you into a shareable cutely named personality type, and they bolted on crowd-sourced questions to see if whatever they hadn't thought of themselves might be relevant.

Ten years later, the social media revolution is in full swing, the relatively small service they built that had catered mostly to nerds was suddenly lucrative, and they sell to Match Group and this happens.

To be entirely fair to these guys, I don't think they came into it intending to sell out as their long-term goal. But four guys who got into data analytics in college also didn't find themselves as their mid-30s approached particularly wanting to run a dating service for the rest of their lives, either.

Whatever happened to FetLife? If any dating service had to be privacy-focused, that was it.

[nemomarx]

Users who want to be private and are willing to pay extra for it are necessarily highly valuable for data brokers and advertisers. So incentives always push towards betraying them eventually I think.

[jmye]

Is that true? Not arguing, just curious. I would imagine that the highly valuable users are those most likely to buy things, and people that into privacy would be fundamentally more likely to also go to extremes to block that advertising, but this is very much not my area.

[gjsman-1000]

> Am I too idealistic?

Open source developers are wildly idealistic. In the rest of the world, I have finally internalized...

1. Most people say they care about privacy... but won't spend even $1 for it. They care about their privacy about as much as an open source developer cares about user experience. Just extract the tarball, it's not that hard.

2. Most people don't care about technology and want it out of their lives. They don't want to know what sideloading is. They don't want to know how to discern safe from dangerous. And they aren't wrong. How many open source developers know how to drive manual? Car enthusiasts have just as much of a righteous claim to attention, after all. The model railroad enthusiasts are also upset by our community's lack of attention. Every enthusiast, in every field, hundreds of them, are upset by lack of mainstream attention, and this will never change.

3. Linux and open source software in general are not even close to being popular on the desktop. Gaming and web browsing is a tiny subset of what people buy PCs to do, and Linux isn't even close on the rest. Even the gaming success is so niche it's irrelevant in the grand scheme of things (Switch 2 outsold 3 years Steam Deck sales in the first 24 hours).

4. Some of this optimism was deluded from the start. Like when Stallman said we can defeat proprietary software with open source, then openly admitted he had no idea how any open source developers could afford rent. "If everyone works for free, while the big companies stop working, we could get ahead" is gobsmackingly naive and it's honestly astounding anyone fell for it.

[LtWorf]

> Most people say they care about privacy... but won't spend even $1 for it.

Maybe they are smarter than you and noticed that trust is being violated constantly so paying for it in no way means you will obtain it and is just a waste of money?

[dfxm12]

Popular apps, like OKCupid, will get bought, along with their user data. Also, mission creeps when management changes.

I mean, an app that starts out as "privacy focused" won't necessarily stay that way.

[fsflover]

F-Droid is the app store for such apps. FLOSS requirement ensures that everyone can verify the claims.

[throwway120385]

The problem is that large-scale use of the Internet for social networks and for organizing meetings in real life is fundamentally incompatible with privacy. It works for small, tight-knit insular groups, but as soon as you expand the scope of the network to include acquaintances and friends of friends you'll eventually find a connection to someone who cares less about privacy than about making a buck.

If we had a sort of "federated" system we'd still have this problem because you might always find yourself federated with someone who just wants to sell the information.

It's a cultural problem within this hyper-aggressive version of Capitalism that we've adopted, that even data about people has value. Until we decide as a culture that this kind of data sale or data use is shameful and unacceptable we'll be in this situation no matter what technical solution we adopt.