bthdonohue

It's me. For what it's worth I was involved with Instapaper at betaworks (after Marco sold it to betaworks), and Pinterest sold it back to me. Been 12 years with it now!

Glad to hear :-)

Thanks Jorde – appreciate it!

Hey there – we started requiring passwords many years ago, but the service originally launched without requiring a password or email address. You can read more about it here: http://blog.instapaper.com/post/2318776738

Hey zulrah, we are working on GDPR and plan to have the service available in the EU as soon as possible. Hope to have you back on Instapaper when we become available in the EU again. Really sorry for the inconvenience.

I read HN regularly, but I'm pretty much a lurker on all social channels. When there's a conversation relevant to me or the products I work on, I like to jump in to represent the relevant company or products.

With respect to follow ups, I usually respond and move on to other things. I do my best to be open and transparent in online communities like these.

Moving onto your privacy concerns there are two things I'd like to say...

* Instapaper has always done hard deletes of user data when you delete articles or your account, it's been done that way since the Marco days.

* We have never monetized using user data, or developed any type of special targeted advertising for Instapaper.

Hi Brad, Brian from Instapaper here. Just want to reassure you that's not the case here, we intend to operate Instapaper for the foreseeable future. We made this decision because we believe it’s best for both Pinterest and Instapaper.

Hey there – Brian from Instapaper here – we have a pretty clear and accurate privacy policy around the data we collect and how we use it, you can find it here: https://instapaper.com/privacy

The scope of work for GDPR was underestimated by me, we were not able to complete that work for the deadline on Friday, and this was the required alternative.

We are working very hard to minimize the service interruption.

The ban will be IP-based for IPs in EU countries, and it goes into effect at approximately 2PM Pacific Time.

The ban will be an IP-based ban for IPs from countries in the EU.

The ban that goes into effect tomorrow will be IP-based for IPs in EU countries.

Hey – Brian from Instapaper here. I've been at Instapaper since the betaworks acquisition in 2013, so I have a lot of context here.

We've made tons of progress since I joined, redesigning the apps, websites, launching highlights, rebooting our business model, text-to-speech, speed reading, re-writing our parser, re-building our full-text search engine. The list goes on.

We currently don't have an image proxy for Instapaper, so yes when you visit the site we load the original images. We have discussed adding an image proxy but felt it would be a lot of overhead in server costs and maintenance for minimal value.

Additionally, I'm not sure it's fair to represent that fetching images from the original sources that a user saved is tantamount to sharing data with third parties, which has a different set of implications.

We detail the types of information we collect and how we use the data in our privacy policy here: https://www.instapaper.com/privacy

The email we sent to EU users (quoted in linked article) has the important details regarding the service interruption in the EU.

Additionally, I can say that our privacy policy is concise, clear, and accurate with respect to the types of information we collect and how the data is used: https://www.instapaper.com/privacy

If you have other specific questions, I will do my best to answer them.

Hey all – Brian from Instapaper here. We worked really hard to try to avoid a service interruption in the EU, but unfortunately we were unable to. We continue to work hard to ensure that the service interruption is as brief as possible.

Let me know if you have any questions...

Hahaha, meetings on my team at Pinterest are a little more substantial than that, but maybe it varies team to team?

Please take all my upvotes

I believe this only applies to applications that use Instagram's API, which we do not. https://techcrunch.com/2013/08/19/instagram-cracks-down-on-c...

Brian from Instapaper here, we originally wrote it that way, but it felt really weird and disjointed, especially if you weren't familiar with the entire history. Just wanted to keep it consistent, not really take credit for Marco's accomplishments.

I understand and appreciate the skepticism, however, the reason we're making this change is because we want to provide the best experience for our users.

Pinterest receives value from the ongoing operation of Instapaper in the form of continued parsing improvements and aggregate information about links on the web, and that value is enough to justify our relatively small operating costs.

To better understand news and trending links on the web.

Well I meant specifically with respect to going free. As a policy, we do not publish usage numbers.

Brian from Instapaper here. We have no plans to shut the app down, and a big part of the value the app provides (parser improvements, aggregate information on links) requires the ongoing operation of the service.

Brian from Instapaper here. It was three of us, and two came along with the acquisition. We all agreed to it before making the decision.

Hi there,

Brian from Instapaper here. We will not be serving advertisements in your Instapaper queue. The value Instapaper provides to Pinterest in terms of parser capabilities and aggregate information about links is enough to justify the small operation cost of running the service.

I'm happy to answer any other questions you have.

Brian

As part of my computer science program in college, we studied the ACM's Software Engineering Code of Ethics and Professional Practice, which in effect is what you describe. http://www.acm.org/about/se-code

You can export your articles at instapaper.com/user as always, however, we will not be using Instapaper users' personal data for any type of targeting or sharing off-service.

The team was open to moving to SF as part of the acquisition. Also, there are only three of us so it wasn't as if many people were uprooted.