As others have said, management (in my experience) never has the full picture, it has its own perspective.
I'm curious about the breach of trust you feel -- surely investors in a company don't relinquish their values or place unconditional trust in the company? The Kapors are not a PE firm, and their ethical stands have been known for decades.
You can't on the one hand benefit from the brand value of investors like Mitch & Freida and not also expect such stakeholders to also expect a certain caliber of behavior by the company.
I think investors in a startup are forgiving of early missteps. Uber is way, way past that stage.
Out of curiosity, have you looked at Mozilla's Pontoon and if yes, can you compare/contrast the goals of Parrot w/ those of Pontoon? https://github.com/mozilla/pontoon
This was done in partnership with the Internet Archive folks -- they _want_ the traffic, in part because this helps people know about the Archive, but mostly because this is a public benefit feature, which is what non-profits strive to provide.
As to the amount of traffic it generates, that's one reason why we're doing this through Test Pilot -- we can dial that up or down.
Good questions. At this point, we're trying to identify user value with prototypes. We're a long way away from defining things like the software update model on as-yet-unspecified devices.
When it comes to data privacy, remember that Webmaker is not a social network. It is an easy-to-use publishing platform for people whose only internet access may be from a low-end Android phone. We don't ask for or store real names to create user accounts.
All projects on the platform are publicly accessible/remixable under a CC-license (it's a free, no-ad app -- all we ask from our users is that they contribute to the commons). We currently store all user data on Amazon RDS.
You may be interested in some of the user research we did as part of this project as well:
* No Real Names requirement.
* I think we have a single account per email address, but I don't think that's what you mean. Also, you can likely use +whatever on your email addresses if you really want to.
As to centralization -- I'm as worried about centralization of the net as Brewster Kahle, but that's as yet an unsolved problem, and not the one we're tackling with Webmaker. We're (just?) trying to make an app that makes it easy for people new to the internet to see that they can create web content, not just consume it, even if all they have is a low-end android phone and low literacy. The app storage architecture is centralized today, but I'd be happy to explore ways to federate it, once we get to the point where it we've confirmed the app is attractive to its main audience.
TLDR: Sorry, this isn't the droid you're looking for =)