I spend a lot of time reading BoingBoing ( http://boingboing.net/ ) because it points me at interesting/quirky/important/insane stuff and enough of it is interesting enough that there are generally two or three tabs open in my browser that I plan to explore.
Such as this one – http://boingboing.net/2012/11/21/expereal-iphone-app-to-ratea.html – a post by Jonathan Cohen about what looks like a really interesting iPhone app called Expereal that will ‘let you rate/analyze your life via data visualization’ I’m interested in lifelogging, but have only gone as far as getting a Fitbit (http://www.fitbit.com/uk/product).
This afternoon I finally got around to clicking the link in the BoingBoing piece, thinking I’d install Expereal and try it out. But I won’t – the page at http://expereal.com/ tells me all the cool stuff it will do, and then notes that I have to:
Login with Facebook (Required & only means of login)
and that I can
Share individual ratings to Facebook (Optional)
Thanks, but no thanks. I don’t want a system that forces me to share with Facebook. I have no reason to trust Expereal with my data, and certainly no reason to believe that the boundary between it and Facebook will end up being anything but porous. The app is free, so data sharing is the price to pay, it seems. I’d rather have paid £1.99 for something to try out, and be a customer instead of a data feed.
Musings from Bill