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by casca 4964 days ago
"Trust" is a big offer. There are 2 main trust issues when I give my contact information to another company: 1) Will they keep as private as I would? and 2) Will they still be around in 5 years?

Your model means that I can somewhat believe 1), but 2) means that I personally would not use such a service.
2 comments
tristanthomas 4964 days ago
Hi casca,

I totally understand and have actually stopped signing up for startups without a clear business model (even YC ones). I hope that our model means that we will be and if for some reason we aren't, because we make your data fully portable and completely yours, it would be very easy for you to move. Please feel free to email me at hello@columns.co if you want to discuss this further.

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diminish 4964 days ago
Could you please elaborate on privacy and security features you use, on storing and transmitting the contacts.
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kijin 4964 days ago
> Your model means that I can somewhat believe 1)

What makes you believe that your data will be kept private? Is it the fact that they have paid memberships and they have something that looks a bit like a privacy policy on their landing page?

As for me, I'm not sure whether I want to use the word "trust" to describe my relationship with a company that offers "storage" in the "cloud" without any mention of, for example, encryption.

Trust is not something that you can naturally expect people to have toward a brand-new web service in this day and age. If you really want to use the precious T-word, you'd better do something that leaves any reasonable customer very little choice but to trust you. For example, solid encryption (preferably client-side) and easy exportability would minimize the risk of anything bad happening to my data even if you decided to sell yourself out to some evil corporation next year. If you already have such features, please put them on the landing page.

Not trying to bad-mouth your project in any way, just trying to point out some potentially worthwhile possibilities.

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tristanthomas 4964 days ago
Hi Kijin,

We haven't put enough details about encryption on the landing page (because we didn't want to overload the page) but we will do very soon.

With regards to exportability, if you check out the feature in the bottom right (Full Ownership) you can see details about how easy it is to take your data elsewhere.

Hope that helps and thank you for your comments, really appreciate it.

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pavel_lishin 4964 days ago
> if you check out the feature in the bottom right (Full Ownership) you can see details about how easy it is to take your data elsewhere

There isn't a lot of details there. The sentence I quoted above is longer than the details in the "full ownership" box.

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