Bad Indie Developers

Indie developers are commonly heralded as the better choice when it comes to ethical business practices like privacy. But sometimes they are as self-centered as large corporations.

After changing my e-mail on a microblogging platform run by a sole indie developer, I received a newsletter in less than 24 hours, even though I never opted-in. And – of course – all the links have tracking capabilities. He used MailChimp.

I checked my account to see if there’s any way of knowing that a newsletter will be sent. There’s none.

I checked help and searched for “newsletter” and only found the privacy policy, which casually states the used third-party services. The privacy policy doesn’t even mention the words opt-in or opt-out. But the beginning of the policy states rather euphemistically:

>Ad-supported businesses often track a lot of information about you to better serve advertisers. Micro.blog isn’t like that. We have no ads and the business model is a simple subscription where you pay for extra features you use, such as blog hosting. We only collect enough information to run Micro.blog.

Micro.blog’s Privacy Policy

Well, tracking of unique user interactions with a newsletter is not needed for running Micro.blog.

Their stated reason, why I received this newsletter from the newsletter itself: “You’re receiving this email because you signed up for an account on Micro-blog.”

Very uncool. Never heard of double-opt-in? This has been the standard for newsletters for a very long time, unless you don’t care about your users.

Raw E-Mail Content