LinkLocker

It's no secret that we're firm believers in the idea that our users' data is theirs alone, and that it should be kept private. Part of our overall privacy maintenance strategy is simply to avoid doing a lot of the really gross and/or stupid things tech companies typically do in order to show you ads, or to track your behavior for their own "learnings," etc. Because these sorts of things aren't always immediately obvious, we think it's important to spell out explicitly what it is we aren't doing. To that end, I'll be publishing a series of posts tagged "Things We Don't Do." For this first installment, I'd like to talk about our logging policies. Most services store a reference to everything you do, even when they don't have a good reason to do so. We store as little info about you as possible.

It's quite entertaining to watch Venmo try to explain away the default behavior of their app, which broadcasts users' transaction info publicly. The unnamed PayPal spokesbot cited in that story claims the service was "designed for sharing experiences," which is a delightful wad of claptrap devised in order to spin the fact that they must want to publish this data about your finances in an attempt to attract new users.

Everything in Silicon Valley may "need" to be a disgusting "growth hack" in order ...

Instapaper has announced that it's going independent (again!):

We want to emphasize that not much is changing for the Instapaper product outside the new ownership. The product will continue to be built and maintained by the same people who’ve been working on Instapaper for the past five years. We plan to continue offering a robust service that focuses on readers and the reading experience for the foreseeable future.

It's great that they're going indie again, and it's especially good to ...