Control Your Data: Upgrading Our Data Stack And Privacy Settings

Today, we are excited to announce significant improvements to the Minds data stack. 

At the forefront of our mission has always been to protect user privacy. We are one of the few social networking apps left in the world that refuses to embed any Google or big tech tracking pixels in our software. That includes some of the alternatives that claim to support Internet freedom yet continue to use this kind of spyware and other unknown proprietary code. We believe passionately in using open source software to maximize user trust through transparency and accountability.

As an obvious reminder, Minds does not sell your data to anyone or share it with any third parties for tracking purposes. 

The data we collect is strictly for our team to make insights into how the software is used and improve the product. And with these new improvements to our data stack, users on Minds will have more transparency and control over their data than ever before.

What Kind Of Data Minds Collects

In order to understand the changes we have made, we first want to define the two major types of data that Minds collects: Public Data and Observational Data. 

Public data is data that you have made public on Minds. Examples of public data we store include things like:

• What posts you have engaged with
• What posts you have created
• What groups you are in
• Who you subscribe to
• Your username and description

Observational data is data that we collect about your behavior on Minds, so that we can gather insights on how people are using the product and identify areas for improvement, as well as better identify spam and inauthentic engagement. Examples of observational data include things like:

• If you have seen a recommended post or boost in your feed already
• What pages you visit
• What buttons you click
• Where someone fell off during onboarding

Issues With Our Legacy Data Stack

Our legacy data stack leveraged tools like Snowplow and Superset for event tracking, dbt processing and data visualization.

The main challenge with this data stack was that it was very expensive and lacked proper tooling for users to be able to easily delete or download their data. It was possible, but it was a costly and timely process for Minds to handle these requests.

Because of this, we used Pseudonymous ID’s for all observational data that we collected. Pseudonymous ID’s meant that both Minds and its users were not able to see what observational data is stored about them, as the data was anonymized and not associated with their specific user ID. 

This reasonably solved the issue of users not being able to easily delete this data, as it was not associated with them. But it also made it very challenging to make any useful insights from the data, because it was not possible to connect the observational data with other public data. 

Why The New Data Stack is Better 

Moving forward, we will be migrating our data stack to a new tool called PostHog, which is  more cost efficient and provides a number of major improvements.

First and foremost, PostHog is fully open source which is aligned with our data philosophy. 

Additionally, it provides far more tooling for users to control how their data is collected on Minds, which can now be accessed in your new Privacy Settings:

• You can now easily opt-out of observational data tracking
• You can now easily delete their observational data
• Coming later: Delete your public data
• Coming later: Download your observational data 
• Coming later: Download your public data 

Note: Opting out of observational data collection is in your control, and will have a few impacts on your experience. In recommendations, you may see posts that you've already seen, because we won't be able to filter out posts you've previously seen. Additionally, because observational data enables us to identify spam and inauthentic engagement, opting out of observational data collection impacts how your engagements are counted. It won't interfere with your ability to upvote and comment on posts on Minds, but we won't be able to use your votes for trending rankings and engagement rewards.

Summary

TLDR: Our new data stack is a lot better for everyone.

• Save us money and time
• Give you a lot more control over your data
• Increases transparency and control
• Help us make better insights to improve the product

As always, thank you for being a pioneer for Internet freedom.

The Minds Team