Today we received an email that a user has closed AdaptiveBlue account for the following reason:
Nah, don’t need yet more consensual spyware. Cool idea, but obviously you’re just out to track my habits, who knows to what end. If you weren’t, you’d offer the option to store the data on a private DAV server for synching, or to disable the synching ability entirely, and only store the data locally.
Obviously privacy is a huge issue and we are continuing to educate and message out our position on this important issue. It is rather disappointing, when smart users like this one think that we are trying to trap them. We do not. We have not. And we never will in the future. We take privacy and data ownership very seriously, as the approach that we take is at the very core of AdaptiveBlue.
We founded a company a year ago with the clear vision that user’s personal information belongs to them and that they decide what to do with the data. We have written the BlueOrganizer to comply with Attention Principles established by attention trust. This is why you can explort, import and delete your information anytime you wish. Our goal as a company is to become a player in attention market place and help you connect with the services that you choose. We are not and never will be here to scam your data.
We have written extensively about privacy and our vision for attention economy. For privacy discussion, please see this post in August of last year. Our views on Attention Economy, particularly how it will work from both technical and business point of view are in this post on my personal blog.
Finally to address this specific comment. First, and most importantly, you decided to create AdaptiveBlue account. That was not required, it was explained that you only need to do this if you would like to sync your data between computers. If you do not create the account your information is local, it never goes out to S3 or AdaptiveBlue.
Secondly, we have looked at providing people with alternative storage. Particularly we looked at GoogleBase and a few other storage API. While we think that we could make it work, at this point it is quite a lot of work and we decided to hold off. If we hear that this is an issue from a bunch of people we will offer alternative storage. Ultimately, our vision is that BlueOrganizer will offer you a choice where to store your data.
Hope this clarifies things.
Alex
