Privacy vs. Sharing — Who Wins?

Privacy does not correlate with virality (of apps and services). Actually, breaking privacy rules is the recipe for success (empirically) and has been very profitable for some companies. This is true for address book/ contacts app like Pintact too.

At Pintact, we strive to give the control of the information to the owner of the information at the risk of lowering the virality of the app.

(How we define) Differential Privacy: Ability to share different parts of information with different audiences privately.

Pintact achieves differential privacy for user’s contact information by letting the user’s create multiple profiles. Each of these profiles can be shared to different contacts or groups. At Pintact, the user controls who sees what. We feel good to have solved a problem in a simple way: Permission based sharing of multiple profiles with a contact or a group of contacts. Changes to these unit of data (we called profile), is automatically disseminated to targets using a push (reference)/pull(copy) method.

For example, user has different different profiles for your different groups or networks. That way you can keep your work and family separate on Pintact.

We have another feature: Pintroduce. It allows users to introduce their contacts to each other without sharing the contact info before hand. It requires a double opt-in to create a connection. The introduced users feels safe knowing their contact info is not shared without their permission. They alone control which profiles and what details they share with someone. This, we believe is a significant improvement over the status quo where you can send anyone’s contact info as visiting card file — which may be actually outdated or shared without the person’s permission.

Here’s the reality check:— As we interacted with consumers, we got the following —

“I want to share contact info from my address book now”, “I am not sure — how will the introduced user respond and when” “Send me an introduction but do make the contact information accessible immediately”.

We found apps which would allow friends(contacts) to search for contacts in your address book— Is there a more Social and Open society ?— where there is nothing to hide, everything is open.. Or, maybe a trusted network protocol — Never add someone you don’t trust and once added feel free to share your existing contacts.

This brought up another introspection: for whom are we building the app? The privacy sensitive users? Is privacy a sensitivity or a right? Or, for the user who wants gratification by receiving and sharing their contact info instantaneously.

Pintact allows users to make themselves un-searchable on the Pintact platform in Search Settings. You’ll never have to worry about strangers trying to add you and you can exist on the app the way you feel most comfortable.

We have realized that — Share-ability (ease)and Privacy/Control do not go hand in hand. Pintact as a company has taken an instance to provide absolute control of contact info to its owner. It is these opposing goals that makes Pintact unique and challenging.