Common plight these days. I've considered making throwaway facebook profiles for these sorts of things before, but there's got to be a better solution.
Why wouldn't you make a throwaway Facebook profile? My Facebook account was initially created as my legitimate account, but now I treat it as essentially a throwaway. It makes logging in to most random little sites extremely handy, and I see no measurable downside.
If you want to remain any kind of anonymous, it means logging into each facebook login-enabled site with a new, fresh fb account. Using one trash account might stop them from linking things to your 'real identity' (such as fb perceives it), but it still lets them link all of your activities together and build a profile. Persona linking from there isn't hard, based on usernames or email addresses used (see pipl and similar for examples of casual, publicly available version of these tools). But even if there's no persona/pseudonym linking algo going on, you're still being 'tracked'. It's not fully anonymous.
This is a product for tracking everything you do, and tries to accomplish that by pulling data from other services that track everything you do.
Is Facebook uniquely untrustworthy in this category? Is there anything about Gyroscope that makes it uniquely trustworthy, if only they gathered your data directly?
It isn't about being untrustworthy: I don't use Facebook, I use many other things but not Facebook. If he has the code to handle Facebook logins, he has the code to handle Google logins as well.
Let's not just assume the parent of your comment thinks Facebook is untrustworthy; how about if someone (like me, for example) just doesn't have a Facebook account?
IIRC the friends list is in the default app permissions, and calling the graph API only returns the friends on your list who also gave the same permission to the app.
I would like to use it but not reveal who I am. I think this is more than fair enough reason, and probably the direction these guys should move towards.
I don't like Facebook but I have an account because my mom and wife do too. So I choose not to connect my account with anything. Am I an unacceptable weirdo?
Even if I am in a tiny minority, I don't have a Facebook account and I would prefer to continue not having one
(motive: snobbism, more than privacy concerns).
So if a service is only available through a FB login I decline to use the service.
The main issue I have with Facebook is that their goal is diametrically opposed to the concept of the Internet that I would subscribe to. They are actively working toward attaining a monopoly for online social activity. In a sense, they want to become the "social wrapper" for everything that is done on the Internet.
I completely deleted my Facebook account a few weeks ago and quickly am realizing how far-reaching their monopoly already is.
This point alone - which doesn't even include the many, many privacy issues FB has - is enough for me to say I will not use a service that requires a FB login.
I made the April Zero site by myself, but Gyroscope has been a massive undertaking with many people involved.
@ericflo built most of the backend and API powering this, and some of our other friends like @mirashii and @wingfield also helped build some of the features. Our investors have also been a huge help, from @semil getting us great deals on our hosting last week to @jyri helping us with legal issues and @hiten being a brilliant source of product inspiration. It's a team effort and everyone has contributed so much in the last 6 months.
It's taking a while to connect to everything, but I'm really pumped to see my data in this interface. I've been working on something similar — an automatic journal based on Moves/Instagram/Dropbox etc. One reason I'm scared to publish is data security — are you storing any of this data, or pulling from 4+ APIs every page load?
It actually shows more than health data, it's like a personal dashboard for your activity, may it be physical (fitbit, jawbone and so on) or digital (instagram, twitter, foursquare)
Why not take it one step further and throw medical records up there too? I'm sure the world would love to hear about that yellowish discharge you went to your doctor about.
In Linux Firefox the 3d rotations are aliased and ugly. Could you just give us a normal web page? This web site has all the problems of bad flash websites but built in JavaScript.
That said, I would pay money for a license to run a personal instance of this. The data aggregation you need to make it work would be much less scary that way.
Yes, I don't know why all this data has to be stored in the "cloud" and can't be stored locally. That way if you really want "the cloud" you could just use Dropbox or Google Drive or any of the other billion cloud storage services out there.
He wrote a couple of articles about how he build the service for himself and it used Python with Django so it's safe to assume he stuck with that stack https://aprilzero.com/journal/making-of-aprilzero/ (he's whole site seems to be down now, perhaps the HN effect)
We've split the backend into a service layer written in Go, a data fetching and processing layer also written in Go, and a web layer written in Python/Coffeescript. We use Kafka to connect a lot of the pieces together, and data is stored in PostgreSQL and Cassandra.
@ericflo will probably pop by and answer a little bit more, but the major pieces are a golang powered API stack, a Django app that consumes that API stack and does all the template rendering and such, and a lot of background workers based around Kafka/Storm to pull the data from the third party services. @aprilzero can certainly talk more about the frontend stack.
I really hate it when websites override Safari's scrollbar and substitute a 5px one that may fit the theme of the site, but is virtually impossible to grab because its hotspot is only a tiny bit larger than the edge of the window.
Nowadays, I find the only interaction I have with the scroll bar is to look at it to determine how far down a page I am. I always use the scroll wheel on Windows or the two finger scroll on the Mac trackpad to scroll a page.
Dear @aprilzero, I'm loving the dashboard. Hope you can add in more integration with other services, like kanbanflow for productivity (it comes with a nifty pomodoro timer) and miband for fitness.
I never ever login or vote or whatever but I've been looking for something like this forever. I was thinking about doing this myself for such a long time. This is amazing.
It says there are 5 steps, with the first four steps containing free apps, and the 5th step containing an integration to RescueTime, which appears to cost money. I don't particularly want RescueTime. Am I just going to be on the "waiting list" forever, then?
Also, please provide a way to cancel the account. :)
Rescuetime is free. They have a paid upgrade but you don't need it.
And you don't need to have all of the steps complete, just a majority of them. There isn't an exact threshold, we just want people to have a good experience and not start off by landing on a mostly empty page.
Question: Moves (which I already use) tracks cycling and runs - why do I also need to link Runkeeper/Strava/Fitbit in addition? This appears to be redundant.
Other question: How do you get back into the "follow these steps" page once you've clicked away? The link on the front page has been replaced with a notification that i'll be emailed when my account is set up. (http://gyrosco.pe/setup/)
Moves does theoretically track that stuff, but it is not reliable enough. For example, walking quickly or being in a car often ends up being considered cycling for half a block.
On the other hand, if you turned on Runkeeper or Strava and say you're going for a run, that's probably 99% reliably what you actually did.
Also I think the page you want is the dashboard: https://gyrosco.pe/dashboard/ - we are working on building a more intuitive global nav so people don't get lost.
I also tried Moves and found it really bad if you're actually interested in accurate tracking your location. Runkeeper and Strava seem to use a lot of power because it's GPS only. Is there a GPS+celltower combo app you've found? I found GPSLogger for Android tries both GPS and cell tower, and stops when one of them returns with an accurate enough coordinate. So it gets amazing accuracy and uses very little power at the same time, since 95% of the time it uses cell tower.
Very cool animations on the UI side. I'm one of those users that wouldn't trust to share all of that data though. Like others pointed out, maybe if there was the option to run it on your own infrastructure...
I second this opinion. We're getting ready to enter the era of being able to host our personal data on our own infrastructure. Let's start making that available with all offerings, instead of making these centralized hosted solutions that all require different types of access.
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 202 ms ] threadhttps://medium.com/gyroscope-innovations/introducing-gyrosco...
-_-
0.https://developers.facebook.com/products/anonymous-login/
Is Facebook uniquely untrustworthy in this category? Is there anything about Gyroscope that makes it uniquely trustworthy, if only they gathered your data directly?
I completely deleted my Facebook account a few weeks ago and quickly am realizing how far-reaching their monopoly already is.
This point alone - which doesn't even include the many, many privacy issues FB has - is enough for me to say I will not use a service that requires a FB login.
@ericflo built most of the backend and API powering this, and some of our other friends like @mirashii and @wingfield also helped build some of the features. Our investors have also been a huge help, from @semil getting us great deals on our hosting last week to @jyri helping us with legal issues and @hiten being a brilliant source of product inspiration. It's a team effort and everyone has contributed so much in the last 6 months.
https://gyrosco.pe/aprilzero
That said, I would pay money for a license to run a personal instance of this. The data aggregation you need to make it work would be much less scary that way.
EDIT: And we've now got more workers!
Would sign up in a second w/out fb login.
I'm under the impression these kinds of designs are built for the Macbook monoculture and assume you scroll using a touchpad gesture.
+1 goodreads integration.
Also, please provide a way to cancel the account. :)
And you don't need to have all of the steps complete, just a majority of them. There isn't an exact threshold, we just want people to have a good experience and not start off by landing on a mostly empty page.
Question: Moves (which I already use) tracks cycling and runs - why do I also need to link Runkeeper/Strava/Fitbit in addition? This appears to be redundant.
Other question: How do you get back into the "follow these steps" page once you've clicked away? The link on the front page has been replaced with a notification that i'll be emailed when my account is set up. (http://gyrosco.pe/setup/)
On the other hand, if you turned on Runkeeper or Strava and say you're going for a run, that's probably 99% reliably what you actually did.
Also I think the page you want is the dashboard: https://gyrosco.pe/dashboard/ - we are working on building a more intuitive global nav so people don't get lost.