Helios Helios

Comments and changes to this ticket

• 

  Ben Adida September 3rd, 2010 @ 09:41 AM

  • State changed from “new” to “open”

  Hi Benjamin,

  We're trying to make it very easy for anyone to vote, thus support for fb,google,twitter,yahoo. The reason we need the email address (or some way to contact you, for example we don't ask for your email address from twitter, we can direct message you if you agree to follow heliosvoting) is simply so we can send you your vote tracking number and tell you when the result of the election has been tallied.

  I'm sorry you feel this isn't privacy friendly, but I think we're actually doing quite a bit to respect privacy: we don't make use of the email addresses in any way other than to serve your needs for the election, and we fully disclose why we ask for the email and what we plan on doing with it.

  Note that Helios supports OpenID (that's how we do Google and Yahoo logins). If there were a way to message users back with OpenID without revealing email address, we would gladly support it, too. But the key thing is to be able to message users back.

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  Benjamin Kellermann September 3rd, 2010 @ 03:08 PM

  We're trying to make it very easy for anyone to vote, thus support for fb,google,twitter,yahoo.

  but not for the possibility to directly enter some contact possibility?
  why do I have to say google, that I am interested in Helios?

  The reason we need the email address […]

  That's what Olivier Pereira just told me after his talk and I totally
  agree with you, that you loose features, when you not have this
  information.
  But there may be people like me, who just want to try how this is
  working (maybe they are sitting in some talk and they are told, that
  they should try it on their own ;--)). They do not need the feature to
  get an email and if they do not have an account on these 4 webapps, they
  even have to register there, before they can make their 5-minutes-survey
  on “how heliosvoting is working?”…

• 

  Ben Adida September 3rd, 2010 @ 03:15 PM

  but not for the possibility to directly enter some contact possibility? why do I have to say google, that I am interested in Helios?

  We're trying to focus on what we're good at, which is voting, and we have limited time. Doing account management yet again seems onerous. We are enabling OpenID, which should be more privacy protecting in the long-run, since you pick your OpenID server, better than us managing your whole profile and you eventually forgetting that we have that data.

  But there may be people like me, who just want to try how this is working (maybe they are sitting in some talk and they are told, that they should try it on their own ;--))

  Agreed, but ... we have to focus on the biggest-bang-for-the-buck feature set, there's no way we can please everyone... having an extra branch of code that would allow you to log in without an email address would make things that much more complex to maintain, and we are already stretched so thin.

  We will soon be doing things like an intro screencast that shows you the features without you registering at all. Also, the nice thing is that you can try the voting experience without logging in: we think that's a big plus!

  We're trying, but we won't be able to cover every use case. Our goal is first to use existing identity providers and social network "virality" so that people can vote with their friends, and friends can discover the power of truly verifiable voting systems... We'll do what we can in the interim to ensure that privacy is respected, by collecting as little information as we can and by clearly explaining what we use the info for.

  I hope you understand :)