Is data privacy a big factor in evaluating adding a SaaS tool to your product?

Alejandro Cantarero
5 replies
A lot of factors come into play when evaluating whether to add a SaaS tool to your product. I’m curious how high this ranks for people and their products. - Does it really factor in your decision? Or are you just look for some minimum level of privacy options in the tool? - Does privacy and security come at too high an implementation cost due to adding barriers? Maybe you want to see usernames or emails in the tool rather than an anonymous user ID, but due to their privacy-forward implementation, these are not available. One specific example that comes to mind is tools for recording user sessions like Hotjar, Crazy Egg, and Fullstory. Hotjar is much more privacy-forward by automatically hiding all data typed into form fields unless you explicitly tag the field to be visible. Crazy egg and Fullstory take the opposite approach and more or less record everything unless you add a masking rule to hide it. While I’d like to say “Hey, it’s great that Hotjar is so privacy-first”, the level of effort to go tag all form fields in our web product is just a lot of work when we can more easily deploy another tool and then move on to other product work.

Replies

George Siosi Samuels
I think there's definitely a fine line. One thing I'm definitely seeing a rise of is user's digging deeper into Privacy Policies and/or making decisions based on whether a note they 'feel' safe with a brand or product.
Alejandro Cantarero
@siosism I've definitely started to see a shift from Privacy Policies that are clearly written just to cover the legal obligation to ones that speak more directly to the customer/consumer. Also some companies have started adding additional privacy documents to their sites offering greater transparency with being more public on their data processors which I've thought is a nice trend.
Peter Marchal
That depend what the saas tool is doing. If the saas tool access webanalytics or finance data, I care a lot about the privacy. If it has access to non critical data I don't realy care.
Yuliia Mamonov 🇺🇦
@peter_marchal I totally agree with this point! I'd go and read the Privacy Policy page only if I share some personal or financial data I want really protected.