Hello, Ello: Can We Trust You?

I was eager to try out Ello, a new social network that has positioned itself as an anti-corporate alternative to the status quo with the rebel cry of "You are not a product."

I got myself an invite and started creating content like the dutiful millennial that I am, and, while Ello is a lot of fun and certainly holds promise, a dive into the company's policies left me wondering if what it's promised is all that different from the big guys.

My first impression of Ello was a palpable sense of opportunity. Ello is basically the Wild West of social networks right now, as people slowly join and figure out how to use it.

Most exciting is the promise of new aesthetics, new forms of communication, and new ways to present oneself on a social network that allows you to play around within its bare-bones format. Ello encourages people to be themselves, or "a version" of themselves—no doubt a nod to Facebook's latest "real names" scandal—but discourages straight up impersonation, a rule that was pretty much immediately broken.

Your profile is your playground on Ello, and you can do what you want with it, for the most part. Want to make weird Twitter-esque jokes? Go right ahead. Long-form poetry? Sure. It all works.

As for me, I'm curating a set of pretty images, interspersed with paragraphs of text. Why? I don't know, why not? It's this kind of malleability that sets it apart from Facebook's Model-T style profiles, and more closely aligns it with Twitter and Tumblr, in terms of functionality.

Ello is a lot of fun when images actually load properly and bugs don't make posts disappear into an internet black hole, but as soon as I started digging into the company's policies, things got a little murky. While Ello maintains that it won't sell your data, it notes that it will track you across the net, store an "anonymized" version of your IP, and use "anonymized" data for their analytics.

The big question here is: how anonymous is "anonymous," really?

While Ello says it scrubs names from data that could potentially identify users, there are myriad ways to configure supposedly "anonymous" data in order to do exactly that. Even though users can easily opt out of tracking and analytics, Ello is asking for an immense amount of trust from its user base in order to assume that it will act benevolently.

Facebook, for example, constructs "shadow profiles" for users containing information they didn't voluntarily provide, based on the interactions of that user's friends.

At this point, all we have is a big, earnest promise from Ello's ostensibly idealistic founders that they won't pull any funny business.

Ello's policies states it won't sell your data and it doesn't "claim any ownership" over user content, but it also reserves the right to make use of your posts without limitation.

While it's hard to see the site betraying its "fuck the man" brand by using user content to make money directly (at least early on), one could foresee them using people's content to target ads. Despite Ello's protests, for all intents and purposes, it'll know enough about you to make money off of you if it wants to.

Moreover, while Ello is currently an independent site, its privacy policy states that if it ever joins up with another business (say, if it partners with or gets bought out by a bigger company, which happens these days, well, all the time), it will share your data with that company.

It also hints at future plans for monetization, noting that it will share user data with, for example, a credit card company if you "decide to buy something through Ello."

Privacy is also a concern in that there is, essentially, none. All profiles are public, and there are no individual privacy controls.

This is potentially a huge problem, especially when it comes to issues of safety like avoiding harassers. Presumably, the site aims to solve this by swiftly and permanently ban anybody who breaks one of their vague and ill-defined "rules," which the company reserves the right to change at any time and interpret as it pleases.

While firm restrictions on hate speech and harassment of any kind are laudable, and the seemingly no-bullshit way these rules are written are a refreshing change from, say, trying to interpret a privacy policy, the rules are quite obviously radically open to broad interpretation.

Ello is a tiny club right now and its clubhouse rules may work while its user base remains a relatively small group of internet cool kid insiders. Whether that will continue if it becomes a bustling network filled with well, the kind of people who use the internet is another matter entirely.

Right now, Ello is exciting, and it seems like a great premise. It might take off, but, judging from how other "Facebook killers" have done, I wouldn't bet on it (remember Diaspora?).

But, if it does indeed take off, does anyone think that the company won't exploit the loopholes and vagueness in its policies to make money? And does anyone think it can do it without, well, turning you into a product?