No Thanks to Public Accounts

I noticed Cooked.wiki in Olly's App Defaults and decided to give it a try, but quickly realized that I won’t be using the service.

Don’t get me wrong -- it looks like a good tool for recipes, and I’ve been cooking quite a lot recently, much more than before -- but there’s one thing that rubbed me the wrong way.

It feels really weird to me to paywall the privacy of your account. Not privacy in a data protection and regulatory sense, but in the sense that your account is public by default, and there’s no way to change that setting without paying.

One could argue that recipes aren’t personal information and that a throwaway nickname would suffice, but it feels like a strange decision.

They’re committed to never running ads, and I respect that, yet this particular choice is… strange.

Imagine if Google didn’t show you ads, but your search activity was public instead. Or if your email provider were free and ad-free, but your emails were publicly visible. Would you use it then?

Maybe it’s just me. It probably is.