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Comment by parfe | Hacker News Reader

Great looking service with some deal breakers:

Needs Access to my entire dropbox account

Requests access to "Gmail" (I have no idea how much access that provides). Why can't it just set the To: Address on an outgoing email? Ifttt has been sending me emails no problem so far. The Gmail permission crosses a line. It doesn't help that Google doesn't explain what access I would grant.

Seems they took the easier path and just defaulted to full permissions. I'm sure enough people don't mind that it was the right decision. Just a personal deal breaker.

Also the Recipe filter needs a quick way to specify "Only my active channels." Or/also, my dashboard reads "8 Channels with 264 possible task combinations. " Why isn't this a link to existing recipes filtered by my active channels?

Ifttt provides no method for deleting your ifttt account or purging your external information.

View on HN

Other side of the coin:

Need my Dropbox access? Sure, here you go. Need my Gmail access, meh, why not?

I'm not horribly concerned with allowing them the access I've granted to Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Dropbox, and Evernote.

Yeah, I had no problem with the other junk.

But a "Whoops, we accidentally deleted all your stuff" in dropbox or gmail would be a tad devastating.

Wow, can 3rd-party services actually delete all your data if they wanted to? It's not just read-only access?

I have no idea!

The permissions page at Dropbox says:

The app ifttt would like to connect with your Dropbox.

    This app will have access to your entire Dropbox.
    Please make sure you trust this app before proceeding.
    You're currently logged in as user@example.org. If you meant to connect from another account, you can logout.

Doesn't define what "access" might entail. If the permissions allow create/upload I have to assume it includes delete as well.

Some of ifttt's Dropbox actions involve doing things like saving an image to your Dropbox, which would be hard with read-only access...

Dropbox has two types of authorization, entire dropbox level and app-folder level. IFTTT allows you to type in a full dropbox path instead of being restricted to /ifttt, so it requests the full access. It would be nice if they offered you the choice, and then if you picked the app-folder, the paths only allowed /ifttt.

It also looks like DropBox doesn't have access levels beyond that. If you have access, you can use any of the API, upload / download / delete / etc.

We need a privacy graph service, one trusted API we sign up to and give it all access. Then developers can simply access different level of our services through this one api.

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