Ask HN: How to improve customer/product experience while respecting user privacy As far as I know, I have to track user clicks; track visited pages for analytics to improve customer experience. As privacy is a significant concern, how does my startup respect privacy and also track user activities to improve customer experience? |
If they don't really care, and to a first approximation that's going to always be the case, then you're mostly distracting yourself from what your customers want/need to solve their actual problems.
And it's attractive because "respecting privacy" is easier than making something people want in the sense that it is vague and sounds good and unmeasurable. This makes "success" a moveable target..."we respected fifteen privacys a minute last quarter" doesn't mean anything.
If you're in business, be in business and do business things. Because that's what you will do if you stay in business. Good luck.
Also avoid sharing too much information about your users if using a third party provider for analytics. It shouldn’t be more than an user ID
And also deal with "they say they respect privacy but they collect data" complaints. Because people who talk about privacy are rarely a sound market segment for anything other than privacy tools...that are free.
The market segment for most products is people who don't care about privacy. Or at least people who don't find privacy a reason to spew moral outrage on the internet.
I mean there are endless HN threads where people are complaining about the privacy evils of products they don't use...e.g. Windows.
Users will complain about it but it will rarely be a deal breaker. Will only matter if the product being offered holds really sensitive info
Either way if a company or Dev wants to respect privacy, that’s great and I applaud it. A product doesn’t need to collect every single piece of data on all their users to figure out their strategy...unless your product’s monetization strategy is all about selling user data
A different implementation for the few people who both care and actually pay.
Your applause won’t put beans in the cookpot.
Definitely a bit of extra work but can be minimal if event tracking is centralized in one area of the code.
But yeah, not saying I recommend you do it, just saying it’s possible and not something that should be seen as a waste of time, especially if you truly believe in creating privacy focused software.