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Comment by ToastyMallows | Hacker News Reader

"This information is solely used by us for debugging and analytical purposes (e.g., to enhance the Service) .... We log information about your use of the Service, including the type of browser you use, access times, pages viewed, your IP address and the page you visited before navigating to our Service. .... We collect information about the mobile device you use to access our Service, including the hardware model, operating system and version, unique device identifiers and mobile network information. .... We may collect information about the location of your device each time you access or use one of our mobile applications or otherwise consent to the collection of this information. ...."

From: https://www.secret.ly/privacy

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In other words, it's not different nor more secretive (likely less) than any other platform for sharing ideas out there.

What would be interesting is an application that does not log and keep track of the user's identity (this obviously does), one that runs on a similar "no-log" infrastructure, and whose code is open source and readily available for auditing.

> unique device identifiers and mobile network information

I always wonder why. Can't you just attach any retargeting/personalization/whatever to the logged-in account? There's no need to know exactly which device I'm using, aside maybe from model and OS version.

Hi, I'm one of the founders. We use unique device identifiers, which you can reset yourself on iOS, to help ensure account security. For example, when you log in from a new device.

If the whole point is being anonymous, is account security important since I'd just rather make a new account instead?

Is this the real reason you need device ids?

> Secret’s concept looks fairly simple at first: Based on the contacts in your mobile phonebook, you’re plugged into a network without establishing an identity or even a static username up front, and asked to share any and everything to that network. While initially you’re only communicating with friends, those secrets slowly trickle out to others depending on whether or not your friends have interacted with your posts.

I'm not sure what to think about this. It sounds more like your app is game of "guess who this secret belongs to". While this is interesting (especially for everyone in college and younger), I feel that you guys need to change your marketing to better reflect reality. of course I could be completely wrong since hn is no longer the demographic for this type of app

We think it's important to notify users when someone from a different device tries to log into your account. We will, to the best of our ability, make secrets untraceable. I can promise you that.

So are you saying that if it was a regular website accessible from a desktop pc you would check against MAC address or some other hardware id to "notify users when someone from a different device tries to log into their account" ?

Most high-security sites do this (including banks, and even Facebook) to let you know when there's unusual activity. In order to recognize the anomalies, you need data. The meta point in our privacy policy is to be transparent about what data we retain and why.

We appreciate the probing questions, as we want to be as clear as possible about what, why, and how we're building Secret.

yes but banks and facebook aren't all about anonymized message posts. it's implicitly understood that they're keeping track of transactions and psuedo public posts respectively

Your kinda biting your own tail here, and this is soo revealing..

Facebook and banks do that because they are built with everything but anonymity in their mind, while instead your primary objective as your slogan says is "Share anonymously with your friends. Speak freely."

You care not about real anonymity, you just care about selling the concept behind it, giving a false sense of safety, just to profit from that, riding on the wings of the need from IT uneducated people to protect themselves now that the alarmism is very high given to what we understood about NSA.

Or, is it just profit? Maybe it would be a smart move from NSA to affileate with enterprises creating such fakely anonymous services..

But really? I just guess it's all about profiting on the need for anonymity gone wrong.

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