"Give us all of your contacts" is not the way I'd start a conversation with a customer.
Introducing Sunshine
11–20 of 24 posts
Re: Introducing Sunshine
#12I really hate to sound negative but all a former VP (or was it SVP?) at Google and an ex-CEO of Yahoo could come up for a startup idea is a new and improved contacts app.
That comment can pretty much be applied to any successful startup in the early days.
reminds me of the famous Dropbox comment
Re: Introducing Sunshine
#13> How do you make the mundane magical? Imagine if your contacts magically stayed up-to-date with no effort on your part.
is this a joke? how can that possibly be the intro sentence for anything? even an actual product, much less a pre-product manifesto, or whatever this is.
honestly, magically syncing contacts sounds sounds pretty sweet. it is a problem i have. i don't know that it is mundane, nor that it's solution must be magical; but maybe that is what it necessitates. but what a half-assed way to try exude apple-ness, or whatever you would call that. it reads like a child's description of the super awesome pillow fort they're gonna build this weekend.
> When your contacts are organized and truly work, they create a flywheel where scheduling, planning, organizing, and being thoughtful about your relationships becomes infinitely easier.
wow, what an evocative analogy. a flywheel! "infinitely easier"? wow! (you get my point.)
seriously, i hate to be so harsh, but it's at least 50% because i'm jealous of the idea of writing a manifesto as a company / product announcement, and i strongly feel like the effect would have been way stronger with just a little heavier editor's pen.
Re: Introducing Sunshine
#14iPhone only... Wow.
Re: Introducing Sunshine
#15Yet it's only on iPhone... Such wow
Re: Introducing Sunshine
#16I can't remember the name, but I'm sure that on the early 2000s I had an app on my Windows mobile device that interfaced with a website that did just this. At the time I did it without thinking about it twice. Now I would not give them my contact data even if they paid me. Google already has it, Facebook and Linkedin already have it - and unfortunately I have no way of getting them to realistically remove that information, but for sure I don't want yet another corporation to get all that info.
Re: Introducing Sunshine
#17Three clicks to get to the actual "privacy policy", i'll save you the time and tell you what they collect: You - name, phone number, work email, mailing address, birthday, "other personal info", data about you from data brokers Your devices - IP, browser, OS, mobile carrier, device info, cookies, any data collected by third party SDKs they use Location - yours, what other users are near you Friends - contacts on your…
Seriously, the fact it's become this easy to collect data leads me to wonder if I should just start an app called "give me your contacts list.com". You give me your data, you get nothing in return, thanks very much.
Besides, I'm still bewildered it's legal to even collect contact data without that contact consenting to the exchange of that information.
If I give $person my $number, I do NOT consent to 50 $people getting that data (Google et al). I no longer even have a reachable phone number since it's not worth the privacy trade offs as that data is no longer under my control. At least emails afford a bit better control.
We need to majorly rethink how data is exchanged between user and service, and if a smartphone has APIs to access contact information, they're smart enough to let me know which person uploaded my PII (so I can cuss at them!).
Re: Introducing Sunshine
#18[deleted]
Re: Introducing Sunshine
#19> How do you make the mundane magical? Imagine if your contacts magically stayed up-to-date with no effort on your part. is this a joke? how can that possibly be the intro sentence for anything? even an actual product, much less a pre-product manifesto, or whatever this is. honestly, magically syncing contacts sounds sounds pretty sweet. it is a problem i have. i don't know that it is mundane, nor that it's solution…
It's not much more than an extension of everything being 'awesome' and 'amazing' etc. when it's merely useful, if that. A trend that I regret is starting to invade the UK.
Re: Introducing Sunshine
#20Yet another data mining front parading as an application, the exact same problem the entire internet is in heated discussion about how to solve. "We will never sell your data" sounds very "don't be evil" and the terms and conditions would no doubt have a clause that they can be updated without notice. Tl;dr: The timing couldn't be worse to launch a product like this.
(edit: I just checked the privacy policy and at the bottom of the list of "how we use your data" they state this as one of the uses - "for any other purpose for which the information was collected." which could be literally anything)
The fun part is if anyone I know ends up using this and tracks me as a contact in their application, then I have no say in my personal information and relationships being slurped up from their end.
Like this, I do not.