I've built many apps throughout the years.

One thing that I've learned is that privacy is a secondary concern. It's never a primary one.

If your app's main differentiation is privacy, it won't sell. Users just don't care about it that much.

Inauthentic activity benefits from privacy though. Inauthentic activity is a primary use case of ChatGPT, which is way more successful than anything you've ever made. Do you think kids using ChatGPT to cheat on homework would care if their chats were "private" but educators could check if submitted essays matched generated content? Uh, yes. So privacy isn't as simple of an idea as you think it is, and is certainly extremely valuable.

▲

ergocoder an hour ago | parent [-]

It's a telling that you picked an example where one user could access another user's private info in an unauthorized way. No famous app does that.

When I say privacy, I mean supporting the company promises a stronger privacy mechanism e.g. run locally, e2e encryption where the company itself cannot access your private info. This is the case for Session.

It turns out most users are okay with you promising not to use/access their private info for other means. That's already sufficient. Then, other factors e.g. usefulness are more important.

	▲	doctorpangloss an hour ago \| parent [-]
		"When I say privacy, I mean everything that makes me right, and everything that makes you wrong." "No no, that's not what I mean. I mean, privacy is this only, specifically this set of technologies applied to this very specific set of products, and nothing else. Whatever definition will allow me to make this conversation as uninteresting as possible." Look, I guess my point is, privacy is complicated. In my example, I suppose OpenAI could authorize access to something. They already do, for training. Right? And in some sense, something valuable leaks from one users' data to another. It is still privacy when access to your data is limited in some important way from other people, even when you (or a lot of people, or other people) could benefit from such access. The biggest apps in the world have very, very complicated privacy stories.