April Zero v3

In other words it suffer a little bit from the hacking in movies syndrome. The real interesting application is the continues monitoring by the system not by me. That kind of defeats the purpose.

I could see down the line how measuring continuously vital signs and blood work could help us detect or prevent illnesses or risky behaviors, but the complexity of its analysis will demand something a lot more intuitive than a dashboard. As of now though, these are all vanity metrics, just as useful as tracking the number of visitors landing on your front page.

I appreciate the car analogy, but if you car were as well designed as your body, you would not need a dashboard. Getting more sleep, controlling your food intake, getting more exercise, drinking less... It doesn't take a dashboard to know when you should act on it; your body let you know naturally. You get fat, tire easily, yawn, feel like your overate.

Knowing what to do isn't the hard part, your mom probably told you everything you should be doing since you were able to take your own decisions ("Don't stay up late", "Go play outside", "Eat your greens"). But as pretty as our tool is, I see this as useful as the tons of gadgets and fancy sport gears I see people wearing at the gym: a palliative which distracts us from the real hard work.

First of all, we're not selling any data, nor do we ever plan to. We do make money by offering a pro subscription--this new design is one of the features, along with things like custom domains and access to our Healthkit app. We've already gotten a few dozen upgrades today, which is really exciting and lets me confidently say things like "we will never sell your data".

We believe that sharing of this data is an important part of the experience for most people. Of course you don't have to, but for many people that is the first thing they want to do. Perhaps only with your family or a few close friends, and not the whole world, but a single-player experience that only exists on your device would be missing many of the experiences that we think are core to Gyroscope.

A small percent of users have made their profiles public, and many of those have set up a custom domain name and are very excited about sharing it and having a personal website that reflects who they are. Having the data in the cloud makes that use-case possible, though of course doesn't require it.

Our new mobile apps are also taking a slightly different approach, where all of the source data is private but allows for curation and customization, and you can export individual images with aspects that you want people to be able to see. I think that will be the right balance of privacy and control for most people, while still allowing sharing of things they want to highlight.

Making my account completely public has been an interesting experiment. When I first did it last year, I wasn't sure what to expect. Overall it has been very positive experience, and my current opinion is that more transparency is generally good. The location data is probably the most sensitive out of all the things we track. For other people, weight or age have been concerns, and we've added settings to fully hide those.

There are things I consider very private and wouldn't want anyone else to see — like my messages, emails, finances, etc. — but I am personally happy to release the data on the site, like what my heart rate is or how much I slept yesterday. That balance will vary for everyone, which is why I have been experimenting mostly on myself before recommending things to others.

The location data is probably the most sensitive, and we've been playing around with other themes that show different combinations of data and keep more of that private.

We might add other login options in the future, but currently we've found Facebook to be a great experience because we can boot up your basic account info (timezone, name, cover photo, age, etc.) without needing all that to be manually entered. It would be a terrible experience if the first 5 minutes on Gyroscope were just spent typing in basic facts about yourself. One of our big challenges with Gyroscope is how to passively power all this stuff without creating any more work for the user. Our goal has been to go through the whole experience without ever needing to use your keyboard to type anything, maybe with the exception of setting your username.