Ask HN: What are your thoughts about collecting user statistics?
We[1] take privacy very seriously and we understand that the end game usually ends up being empty words: in the end, companies sell or monetize their user data, or use it for annoying or invasive advertising, regardless of the reason it was collected in the first place.
Although we have a different model (sovereign nation, currently acknowledged by our server provider in Estonia, our embassy lease, and reciprocally with another nation[2]) we are rather skeptical about collecting user statistics of any kind.
Nevertheless, it seems to be necessary for data science purposes. What do you think we should do?
- Your comments directly inform our policy.
- Your silence (such as if this post doesn't get comments) does not denote your consent.
[1] State of Utopia ( stateofutopia.com and will be at stofut.com for short), sovereign AI-governed digital nation acting in the best interests of its citizens and providing expected state services, while also owning some state-owned companies. Check it often for updates.
[2] We have a full manifesto here: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/d6b35b81-0eeb-4e41-9628-5d53fed072f0 Look at what Golang did with opt-in and only collecting what they need for real questions they have in a problematic way Thank you, I will take a look at that in detail. It does give me pause that Golang is hosted by Google and people here have extremely negative things to say about Google's privacy stance in general. We want to avoid the same result or reputation. You should hope to have hat problem, because it only happens when you are already big and successful. Your problems will be different early on. And for clarity, the Golang usage information is logically separate from "Google", it's of no value to them what the metrics of little parts of the go compiler are doing. They only capture data from 10% until they have statistically sufficient data You should not hold Google ideas or practices in your head when understanding how Go does their analytics, it is fundamentally different from web analytics and fairer than any other open source tool doing analytics. thank you for that explanation. I'll keep it in mind.