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Comment by mwilliamson | Hacker News Reader

I think this is an excellent idea. It lets companies retain the benefits of analytics, but gives users the appropriate power over information concerning them. A couple of questions occurred to me.

Firstly, how much do end-users worry about the transparency of their data? For many users, I get the impression that this is something that they've simply never worried about (although that's somewhat anecdotal!). Do you think that's going to change (or isn't true), or perhaps something that we, as an industry, should be working to change? What's the motivation for a company to adopt this over other, less transparent analytics?

Secondly, I had a look at "My data". At the moment, it's a list of JSON. I'm not sure how transparent this is to non-technical people, nor how transparent it will be when the list contains hundreds or thousands of entries. Do you have any plans to make this more approachable?

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Full disclosure, I work with Neil on the project, https://withregard.io/about (Guy on the left)

Your questions are good ones, and ones that we are trying to test ourselves. I think it probably is true that people aren't concerned about what data is collected by them when using apps at the minute, but that is probably because they don't know. As people become more aware of what kind of data is collected and what it is being used for, I think we could see a change in how people view what they are willing to sacrifice for 'free' things. Privacy is becoming more important as people become more aware of what is being disclosed, and I think people behaving appropriately shouldn't be afraid of disclosing exactly what they are collecting and exactly what they are using it for. My colleague Andrew wrote an article for our blog about this: https://withregard.io/blog

The disclosing the data as JSON is the absolute MVP we could do to get started, although you could argue over the 'V'... Our plan is to start speaking with end users and finding out what bits of the data being disclosed is the most important and find ways to visualize, all the time promoting the fact that they own the data.

Anyway, thanks for the feedback, sign up if you want to find out more as we build out the service.

Hi,

I think that people care more about the data collected when using mobile and desktop apps than websites at the moment, but that that will change. I also think that transparent analytics is a more effective way of improving your app. Transparent and anonymous means you can bring the user in to your analysis and ask them directly what the data means. More and more you see privacy policies declaring that the data collected is anonymous so companies can go further with our service and prove it. Some are already doing this, Firefox and Bower for example.

Ideally we will show the user their data in the context of the charts that the developers have setup. As Kevin said the JSON is a quick fix and you are totally correct to point out how inaccessible it might be.

Thanks for the excellent questions.

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