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!
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.
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.
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.
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.