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Comment by klaustopher | Hacker News Reader

There's a proven way to do this: opt-in instead of just assuming everyone wants this and can opt-out otherwise

While you're correct you won't gain adoption nearly as fast with opt-in. If the OP wants this to take off without major changes then it's going to be opt-out.

Edit: not sure why I'm being downvoted; it's true. If someone has to opt into using your product you're starting out with friction from the gate which is difficult to overcome.

And that is what is inherently wrong with stuff like this. Sacrificing person's wishes for stuff like "growth", "adoption" or "conversion".

That's called capitalism. Until the added friction of respecting a person's privacy is profitable it'll always be the lesser of the options available should you want to grow a company or product.

Morally it's questionable but trying to create a grow a product it certainly shouldn't be surprising. Gitter does this and the HN crowed seemed to really like it last I saw it posted.

Again, you perfectly pinpoint the problem. I don't want a profile on this page. I am perfectly capable of setting up accounts on the platforms I want to monitor and I want to allow people to give me feedback on.

I don't want anybody to make those decisions for me. Just because I set up a public profile on one page, does not mean, that I want others to scrape data from it and use this for their purpose. Of course, stuff like this happens all the time, but it doesn't make it right.

For sure and I'm not saying it's right I'm just saying with how our businesses work it's impossible to avoid.

Haha, that's the reasoning google when they rolled out g+ and that worked out great for them.

Opt-out is legally dubious in most of Europe

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