Your analogy is very good. I don’t use iTunes at all anymore on account of the multiple privacy violations iTunes entails (mixing your application data, with your phone data, with your music data, with your video data, with your financial data). It’s not like Dropbox which is just an account.

I’m not sure we should believe you about not tracking our application data, any more than I should have believed Apple when Apple denied tracking location information.

I’d be more comfortable with a serial number than a login to MacUpdate or some demonstration about what data is being sent out and how it is being handled and stored on your servers.

Thanks for taking the trouble to answer our questions in detail up until now.

MacUpdate Desktop requires a MacUpdate account/login because that’s how we determine your subscription is up-to-date and valid so you can use the app. MacUpdate Desktop accounts also have extra benefits on the Web site, and those are tied to the app (like Watch Lists). Just like MobileMe required a MobileMe account to use, or Dropbox requires a Dropbox account to use, or Mozy requires a Mozy account to use, or the iTunes Store requires an iTunes account (even to get free content).

This is pretty standard procedure. If you’re telling me the fact that MacUpdate Desktop requires an account led you to believe that we’re logging all this data about you, then I’m quite relieved as I don’t think that’s a misconception many people will make. To be clear: we have zero record of what apps you have on your Mac or their serial numbers (it’s impossible to scrape serial numbers from an app, anyway, nor do we have any reason to do this).

-Misha

The reason it appears MacUpdate is logging all the apps is that I believe it requires a MacUpdate account. Are you saying that there is no record on your servers of a given installation of MacUpdate or serial number’s applications?

For the spamming, you have enough information. As a huge mass mailer, you owe it to yourselves and your clients to know the laws on unsolicited commercial email in the major jurisdictions you server.

We’ll agree to disagree on AppFresh, that’s fine. I invite you to compare AppFresh to MacUpdate once more and see which works better these days. For our purposes, we compared both against literally 2,000+ Mac apps (we do extensive testing for MacUpdate Desktop). If you only use a few major or popular apps, AppFresh may work just fine.

Can you clarify the two questions I asked you, vis-a-vis the exact law and where you some how got the idea that MacUpdate is logging all your apps?

I’ll search again for your email regarding the gifting, but perhaps it wasn’t sent directly to me? We’ll certainly be addressing that now that it’s been brought to my attention (just from a best practices perspective, which is to say that I agree with your sentiment on that).

As I mentioned before, I appreciate the constructive feedback that you’ve given us.

I complained to you about the gifting six months ago at least via email. I don’t know if you’ve fixed it. It doesn’t look like it.

You are only allowed to email your customers (i.e. me), not the people to whom I gift apps. I.e. you can legally send them an email with their application serial number and an INVITATION to become a member. And that’s it.

There’s nothing wrong with AppFresh and your policy has been wrong from the beginning. You’re just lucky the AppFresh crew are easy going Germans/Europeans. Another US based team would have launched a concerted protest at your policies across the whole Mac community. Compete on product performance and not on a monopoly position.

MacUpdate set itself up as a community resource, not a company who would destroy other applications to advance their own interests.

As you know, I’m certainly in the top 10% of your customers over the last four years or so so this criticism is coming from someone who knows your site and is an active purchaser of Mac applications.

You can test this yourself, by searching for a unique term like devonnote:

http://www.macupdate.com/devonnote

And you’ll see that it automatically forwards you to the listing since there’s only one result.

But if you search for devonthink, you get a list of search results since there are multiple matches:

http://www.macupdate.com/devonthink

(Btw, you can initiate a search on MacUpdate any time by just typing macupdate.com/searchterm … a handy but somewhat hidden feature :)

I don’t disagree with your perspectives on privacy, but you failed to explain where you got this idea that MacUpdate is in any way logging or storing information about your apps or purchases (beyond MUPromo) when using MacUpdate Desktop. That concerns me beyond being factually incorrect because we certainly don’t want to project that notion, but some how managed to in your case—and I want to address whatever source that came from so that more people aren’t mistaken.

Regarding AppFresh not being listed, I went into some detail about that insofar as not wanting to confuse or tarnish our brand by people mistaking it for a MacUpdate product, especially when we have one that competes with it. You’re free to continue to disagree with that perspective, but I don’t think we owe anyone an apology for not wanting to promote anything that could jeopardize our business (because MacUpdate at the end of the day is a business, with about 10 employees who support their families on the salary they earn… we’re not a bunch of college kids just playing around with a side project).

If AppFresh was as good of an app as MacUpdate Desktop this might be different, but the database it leverages is not as up-to-date as ours and its matching ability is also inferior. It’s extremely difficult to build an app like MacUpdate Desktop—there are literally dozens of different versioning and naming conventions that need to be properly accounted for and accurately matching all of them is very tricky. It’s easy to build an 80% solution, which is what I view AppFresh as being. It’s really hard to build a 99.9% solution, and it’s really terrible when someone goes to update an app and the app they were trying to update is deleted and replaced by an unrelated app (or simply not updated at all). I also already explained that AppFresh redirects to MacUpdate Desktop because of the number of times it’s mentioned in the comments section of MacUpdate Desktop. I suppose we could delete all the discussion about AppFresh in the listing to correct this, but then we’d be guilty of not just not listing AppFresh, but of censoring any discussion about it. I have a feeling in your eyes this would be even worse (it would be in mine, at least).

Regarding gifting, if you could cite the law that we’re breaking I’m interested simply from a technical perspective. I already acknowledged that in terms of best-practices if we’re signing up recipients for our list we really shouldn’t be doing that but instead offering them the option to sign up. But as I mentioned, this wasn’t done deliberately or for any nefarious purposes, it has to do with default settings in our database and how gifting is handled. Gifting is something we added to the system years after launching MUPromo, and feedback like this is important for us to refine and improve it since we hadn’t realize it. Honestly, you’re the first person to ever even point this out to us, let alone voice disapproval of it—perhaps others have thought the same thing, but simply clicked the opt-out link in the email and didn’t really think enough about it to let us know (neither did you, apparently, until months or years later via a discussion in these comments).

We have always valued constructive criticism and feedback and will continue to make improvements to the site and services we offer to the benefit of our members and customers. I certainly appreciate the time you’ve spent to share your thoughts with us.

Of course I’m not concerned about you keeping a record of applications which I’ve purchased that’s in order.

On the privacy issue, I do not and will not use the Apple store. I’m considering migrating our whole company away from Macs as a consequence of Apple’s insane new lack of privacy. But that’s a separate and a long topic.

For AppFresh, not allowing them to use your database I can see. Refusing to list them in your database and redirecting searches for AppFresh to MacUpdate Desktop is just dirty pool. Honestly, I buy a lot less from MacUpdate as a consequence of that and my experience with spamming gift recipients.

In terms of gifting, when I gift an app I do not expect to be signing up my friends, families and colleagues to opt-out marketing. And as a matter of fact you are violating the law by so doing.

Based on spamming gift recipients and refusing to list AppFresh, I haven’t seen much compunction from your crew about violating the law or fair play.

Where did you get the idea that MacUpdate is keeping track of all your purchased or installed apps? We keep track of your purchases through MUPromo, of course, but that’s more for our customer’s own reference than anything else (we don’t share that data, nor do we ever share or sell any customer data) and it’s a common practice among any online retailers. MacUpdate Desktop does not log what apps a member has installed and communicates anonymously with our server once to compare installed versions against our database. If this matter of privacy is the only reason you preferred AppFresh, I’m afraid your reasoning isn’t quite accurate and that AppFresh is guilty of the exact same.

If you email us, we’d be happy to delete your MacUpdate account (this is also standard practice among online sites — try deleting your Amazon account or Apple ID yourself & let us know how that goes ;).

I’m also not sure I would consider enrolling a giftee in our mailing list a form of MLM marketing, especially since we offer and respect any opt-out requests and only market our offers to them. But I won’t argue semantics with you — if you think we’re being shady by not letting AppFresh leverage our database freely (which we pay and employ 4 full-time people to maintain in addition to nearly $10K/month in servers and bandwidth to support our infrastructure), if you think MacUpdate Desktop having to communicate with our servers to accomplish its job is a privacy violation, and if you think our MUPromo mailing list is MLM marketing, you’re totally entitled to those views.

I’m not running either of the applications now as you killed AppFresh by delisting them and not allowing them to use your listings and I find MacUpdate Desktop a huge privacy nightmare (actually how can I delete my own online file with you).

Regarding gifting, if I gift an application I want to gift the application from me and not get my recipient involved in MLM marketing. What you are doing with gifting is extremely bad manners and has left a permanent bad taste in my mouth.

Now that I’ve had lots of negative things to say about MacUpdate, I will say one good thing. For the large downloads and keeping track of our purchases and making sure they stay available to us, you’ve been very reliable. Keep up the good work in that direction.