Can I ask what in particular about our privacy policy concerns you so that I can address your concerns? It's a fairly standard privacy policy developed with our lawyers here in the UK. I have already addressed others concerns further down the comments about referer / ip collection which is required wording as we use Google Analytics on our main website. If there is anything else of concern I'd really like to understand it so I can try to work with our lawyers to address it.
I'm one of the founders of Gradient, the company behind Gurn. I wanted to address this one personally.
First and foremost, Kintra was a completely separate product to Gurn and the products are unrelated in any way. I appreciate how the description of Kintra can be interpreted but let me try and describe it's purpose and see if I can alleviate your concerns.
It was built to address a problem for marketers who were unable to attribute marketing spend and return on investment effectively, in addition to facing the advancing GDPR legislation and the right to be forgotten. At the time, many marketers were using custom events in Google Analytics to track the source of a lead. Due to the walled garden nature of the likes of Twitter Ads / Facebook Ads / Google Ads it can be incredibly difficult to work out which channel is driving a sale when
a) every channel is claiming the sale
and
b) you have no concept of an individual
In addition, without knowing the individual (using an anonymous identifier in a cookie) how you would be able to remove all the data for that individual should a request be served under GDPR? In Google Analytics, due to the way it aggregated its data in order to forget someone, there was the real risk you would need to delete the entire aggregated block of data with many potentially large numbers of user analytics rolled up together. Kintra was built to try and fit this need and is more akin to https://snowplowanalytics.com/ or https://piwik.pro/ solution built with the goal of helping a business understand how effectively they were spending money on social platforms whilst also supporting GDPR and the right to remove an individual's data at their request.
It was designed to be deployed by a client on their own equipment and used only across their own sites, not a large hosted data collection/aggregation platform like Google Analytics that presents one set of data to you about your users but effectively understands how nearly everyone is moving around the internet. We deployed the product to a single client and had no access to the data (as it was self-hosted) and no intent to sell data. As of writing, Kintra has been mothballed whilst we focus on Gurn (lack of focus is the death of startups!) and we can understand the true impact of the GDPR on the web analytics market.
We take our users data and it's security very seriously. With respect to Gurn we only ever interact with your browser when you initiate the software by opening the extension and explicitly performing an action in the UI such as adding a keyword, or when you type 'go' into the address bar. Our business model is driven by generating revenue from teams and larger organisations to enable the provision of a limited free tier for individuals.
We make it cheaper to host in the cloud as there is significantly less burden upon us as a small company in supporting our cloud offering. When we use the term self-host we are actually talking about on-premise clients, think places that might operate under an air-gap such as financial institutions, government departments etc. We've found that these organisations don't particularly enjoy the fast-paced development and release cycles that you can deliver in a continuous deployment environment such as the cloud and we end up with fragmented versions in use across clients. As such we want to encourage as many businesses to stick to the cloud environment as possible and price accordingly.
To date, our largest installations are on-prem, as companies we've dealt with are still getting comfortable with the cloud.
We also have the concept of on-prem/off-prem where we can spin up a dedicated cloud environment should the company require it, but again this involves an extra cost to us and is factored into "self-host" price.
Thanks for the explanation. That was my thought. Assise from the support issues, on prem may be more valuable to those customers. Definitely charge more for things that are more valuable to customers.
This clause exists as we run Google Analytics on the main gurn.io webpage. It was a standard clause suggested by our lawyers here in the UK to ensure our users are fully informed about the possible data collection being conducted by the GA analytics.js tracking code.
Gurn was born in an organisational context, lots of different systems and tools, and everything moving to the web. It can be really hard to stay on top of where the latest policy document is or if someone moves the dev environment to a different server being able to get back to it quickly.
The original idea was to...
1. Make it very easy to remember links - use words that are meaningful to you, not long URLs.
2. Allow storing of deep web links - a large amount of internal content is not indexed by the corporate search engine and the stuff that is out of date.
3. Allow others to update the keywords - the people in the business are an untapped network of knowledge, all it takes is one person to update a keyword and everyone benefits.
As we've developed the product we realised that it was beneficial to individuals too as a really interesting way of navigating their web.
Pocket is more about stashing things to read later and maybe sharing some resources. Gurn is about helping you navigate the web quickly and intuitively - and harnessing the collective knowledge in your group, team, company.
Thanks! The critical thing at the moment is supporting all browsers (particularly IE!) but beyond this, we want to dramatically improve how people discover tools and resources in the workplace. Think recommender systems and the like, it would be great to suggest resources to people based on their colleagues' activity for example. We think there is a lot of potential but it's making sure we nail the basics and then deliver any value we can on top.
My co-founder and I have been working on Gurn for the past 12 months or so and thought it was about time we shared it more widely for feedback.
Gurn is a tool that changes how people find and share information, particularly in the workplace where search engines never quite seem to deliver. It is born out of the frustration we and our colleagues experienced working in large enterprises trying to find things and never being able to. This is a problem that we only see getting worse as information becomes more protected and companies are less inclined to expose data to search engines – leaving only the most open data as searchable.
Gurn works by allowing people to link keywords to URLs. These short words or phrases can then be used to navigate around the web. We believe that people understand their organisations best and Gurn is trying to harness that knowledge and make it accessible to everyone. We talk about it as a sort of people-powered search.
There are a few videos on the website showing how to use Gurn, I apologise - they are all a bit boring at the moment - we will spice them up once we can afford a professional.
A rough guide to how it works:
I can add https://news.ycombinator.com to the keyword ‘hn’ or ‘hacker news’ (or whatever!). Now I can type ‘go hn’ in my address bar and get taken there straight away. It’s as simple as that.
There is a lot more power available - opening multiple websites, searching, collaboration etc and these are shown in the videos. The goal is to put you one step away from wherever you need to be.
We are really keen to get your feedback so that we can make Gurn as useful to as many people as possible.
I'm Simon, one of the founders of Gurn.
Can I ask what in particular about our privacy policy concerns you so that I can address your concerns? It's a fairly standard privacy policy developed with our lawyers here in the UK. I have already addressed others concerns further down the comments about referer / ip collection which is required wording as we use Google Analytics on our main website. If there is anything else of concern I'd really like to understand it so I can try to work with our lawyers to address it.
Thanks
Simon