It all started when Pablo posted a YouTube video of Pillar Wallet integrated with Facebook. This was the start of a series of posts that the marketing team had charted out as part of our April Fool ’s day prank. We had expected a violent backlash from our community, but what followed was totally unexpected by any of us at Pillar.
Sign-in with Facebook to your Pillar Wallet? Here’s what you should know.
Many comments to that video of Pablo were positive or neutral, we hardly received any negative feedback and those that were critical missed the point completely.
The responses to our prank had me thinking the following:
- Our community believes in us and trusts us to do the right thing always! This is truly overwhelming that we enjoy such unwavering support from our users. Not many open source projects enjoy this privilege. So yes, we are thankful and humbled by this gesture.
- However, to err is human. What if we go wrong? What if we inadvertently make the wrong choice somewhere down the line? Who shall keep us in check?
We request the community to always judge us and be critical of us. Yes, features are important but please also verify whether we are staying true to our vision on privacy and decentralization.
As Vitor explained in his previous blog, there is a bit of centralization built-into the Pillar Wallet, which we are actively working to change. We do however request our community to continually check and validate if any new feature we implement affects your privacy or decentralization in any manner.
For example:
- Are we centralizing value? For example, the central storage of identity is risky and dangerous. A leak/hack of this database could result in losing one’s privacy. However, centralization of a list of offers in an exchange, or products available in a store, etc. isn’t risky.
- Is the wallet app requesting more permissions than what is essential?
- Is the wallet app using a centralized service when a more appropriate decentralized service is available?
- Is any feature in the wallet affecting the privacy or security?
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The journey to claim back all our data is a long one and it CANNOT be achieved just by the click of a button (no matter how hard we try and want it to be that easy).
This Project is larger than any single one of us, the last thing we need is for the data to be taken off from Facebook, Amazon, etc. and then handed over to another new demon! So yes, “trust but verify”.