humanetech

Keybase is widely used by members of HN, and discussed in many threads before. I really like the ideas behind the software and the vision to bring public key encryption to the masses.

But what I find odd, and not addressed in any discussions I've seen, is that a commercial company (Keybase Inc) that is about delivering products to prove ones identity, has so little information about themselves. Keybase.io is lacking most of the information you generally find on a company website. Sure, there is a ToS and PP, and a Jobs page, and in a 4-year old blog post [0] I can find a bit on founders, team and investors.

As lead of Humane Tech Community I made it a bit of habit to check openness and transparency of the commercial entities behind cool projects, their position, revenue models and their future plans, and I find Keybase lacking a bit here.

Wikipedia says 'Current status: Open alpha' [1] which I find also weird. This makes me hesitant to try out the service, and I think it could be an improvement to the company to provide more openness and transparency to gain trust with the broader public. Do you agree?

It may be that this is all intentional, because Keybase is indeed in alpha phase and testing out their products to a selected audience of more expert techies, like you all on HN. Would be great to know more about how this fits together.

Edit: If this has been asked before and I overlooked, I'd be happy to just have the pointer to that info.

[0] https://keybase.io/blog/2015-07-15/keybase-raises-series-a

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keybase

Interesting thread on the fediverse about Brave browser, but lacking more background and sources. This toot [0] and this msg:

"first, they sold exceptions to privacy tracking to Facebook and Twitter, now it comes out they've got a header override that allows them to set header exceptions on demand."

[0] https://glitch.social/@tessaracht/101572578668968885