Freedom Isn’t Free
A bomb dropped last week: NetNewsWire is now free. Well, free if you don’t mind giving up you’re privacy. Naturally NewsGator isn’t pushing that fact. It’s buried under all of the PR spin about making money off of their enterprise products and what is being said is being spun some more to make it sound like “free” is an entirely thing.
What you’re not told up front is that NewsGator will now be collecting information about your viewing habits, which articles you save, which you email, etc1. NewsGator assumes that your privacy is worth only $30 to you2. I place a much greater value on mine. Aggregating the data can give some very clear pictures of trends on a wide variety of topics and companies will pay very good money for it. How long until we see on Fox News or CNN “according to NewsGator the blogosphere is abuzz about…”?
Everyone rightfully complained about the Feds lessening our privacy with the PATRIOT Act, but as soon as some company offers a shiny trinket to them for free, concern for our rights as people gets thrown out the window. At least with the PATRIOT Act the chances of me being put under surveillance are low. With NewsGator, it’s guaranteed. No thanks. I’d much rather have the up-front costs on a product and not have usage data collected.
Concerns for my own privacy are one of the main reasons I choose to get a ReplayTV instead of a Tivo. I never liked the idea of Tivo tracking which shows I recorded, how many times I watched, which commercials I skipped - or just as important to marketers - which ones I didn’t skip. They gave the same argument that the data is only being used in aggregate and I didn’t go for it then for the same reason. The data isn’t sent to them in an aggregate form. They receive the individual data on each person and then aggregate it together. It doesn’t take much to keep records of individual use for when the right price is offered for that data or for some rogue employee to take off with it.
Your privacy is something you won’t have to worry about with Cyndicate. We do not, and will
not collect usage data about your viewing habits. Nothing you do gets collected by us3. You and your viewing habits remain completely anonymous not because of our policy that can be changed at any time, but because we never get any information that would allow us to infringe on your privacy. We respect our users rights.
This isn’t to say that privacy is Cyndicate’s only advantage either. It was just the focus of this article. I still believe that Cyndicate offers a superior reading experience due to its organizational features, like full persistence, folders and filters, and some of its more advance features like the automatic rating system. We also still offer full customer support which is another feature Newgator cut with their price change.
Cyndicate’s still my news aggregator of choice and I’m committed to making it an even better product then it already is. We already have a lot of great new features on the drawing board to give our customers even more value for their money.
Footnotes:
1. You can opt out (you’re opted in by default), but if you do you’ll lose some features, like synchronization, according to their FAQ.
2. NNW’s former cost and the cost of my newsreader, Cyndicate.
3. Cyndicate does use Sparkle+ which allows the user to send back machine stats after opting in. It is off by default and all of the submitted data can be viewed by the user in the Update preference pane. None is usage data and none is personal.