Heyo! I'm Afi, I have been working on Bespoke for the past 8 months. I have a good feeling about Bespoke and I think it can only reach it's true potential if it's only open source. My thoughts are below. Bespok's ultimate goals are as follows: -To engage in personalized marketing -To be trusted, because we do personlization
When we mention personalization, it involves gathering extensive user data, such as their behavior, purchase history, and browsing preferences. We understand that handling such sensitive information might lead to concerns about intrusion into users' privacy.
To establish trust in our system and demonstrate our transparent data collection practices, we have no choice but to open-source our software. By adopting an open-source approach, we can gain a competitive advantage in terms of trustworthiness and reliability.
Another crucial aspect of our long-term goal is to become a platform that facilitates data collection for any software operating on the internet. We aim to challenge the narratives surrounding companies like Facebook, TikTok, Google, etc., which have been criticized for exploiting user data to benefit advertisers. We believe that our approach can bring about a positive change, providing advertisers with an alternative platform where everything is conducted openly, instilling greater trust in the system among users.
I think the path forward towards the stated goals above is to start with a Mailchimp alternative. And eventually become the open source personlization marketing platform.
Hope you guys self host it today or sign up to check it out!
Don't forget to give a star on github ⭐
Hello Afi, it's great that you've decided to open source your software and want to drive transparency. If you're willing to share, I have a couple questions.
While it's great that the data collection can be transparently observed, it's not just the actual collection that's problematic. Data ownership, protection, storage, usage, associating with other data sources, creation of personas (accurate or misleading) is concerning.
Lastly, and unrelated, what made you choose an MIT license instead of say AGPL that would better protect your product/company while still being open source? I like the MIT license a lot, just curious.
Wish you the best in your open source journey!
Heyo!
I think I'll start with the last point you mentioned about data deletion. We have thought about this, easiest thing to do is to show what all data the system has on the user, and a button to delete it individually, or wipe the whole thing.
I think this point I mentioned is enough for the user to understand, what personas they belon to, what all things are getting captured and how are they getting targetted. Making all this transparent, and the user know how they are getting targetted would make a whole lot of difference in the industry compared to whats happening today!
Lastly about MIT All the lib and software used in the app is MIT, what else am I suppose to do :)
Thanks for the reply, being able to see the data collected and then click delete is great. Does Bespoke keep all the data on its server and allows the customer to get aggregated results or does the customer get to download the raw data? If it's the latter, the delete functionality becomes... less functional.
Unsolicited advice from internet nobody: I think it's great to allow any kind of transparency in a very opaque industry, thanks for doing that. Since you don't/can't control the data usage after collection, I think leaning too hard into transparency and alluding to data sovereignty/privacy (by presenting yourself as an alternative to exploiting user data) might create unrealistic expectations (like it did for me). This is inviting unnecessary critique and distracting from your main message.