19
votes
New Saturn app says only students can see user data; this doesn’t seem true
Link information
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- Authors
- Zac Hall, Chance Miller, Ben Lovejoy, Michael Potuck
- Published
- Aug 12 2023
- Word count
- 573 words
My take: I doubt this is malicious, more likely is that it’s a small company that hasn’t thought all these aspects through. Is that an excuse though? Questionable.
a fun game I like to play is anytime I read about a tech company I haven't heard of before, I look them up on Crunchbase to see how much VC money they've taken.
in this case: $44 million
VCs wouldn't have invested that money unless they were convinced there was some plausible path to a return on the investment.
if the company isn't selling user data yet, it's only a matter of time before they do. there are relatively few ways to monetize an app targeted at high schoolers, and they pretty much all revolve around showing ads, selling user data, or selling user data in order to show more targeted ads.
(for an example of how widespread and pernicious this is, see Many temptations of an open-source browser extension developer)
This is a really excellent idea, I guess under the umbrella of "follow the money". I'll remember to look into this myself for sketchy-sounding companies in the future.
I mean....if you're selling that as one of your main features you're either incompetant and deserve to fail or malicious and deserve to be in jail.
I doubt Saturn is long for this world.