What the Cluely breach taught me about privacy

When the news broke that Cluely had exposed data on tens of thousands of users, I did not feel like gloating. A competitor's breach is not a marketing win, it is a warning about the whole category. It just happened to confirm the exact bet SideSense is built on.

The safest data is the data you never collect

Every breach follows the same script. A company gathers sensitive user data because the product needs it, stores it somewhere central because that is convenient, and then one misconfiguration or one attacker turns that convenience into a leak. The data was the liability all along.

An interview tool collects some of the most sensitive material there is: your voice, your resume, the companies you are talking to, the answers you were unsure about. Put all of that on a central server and you have built a target. The only way to truly not leak it is to never hold it in the first place.

Why local-first is a security decision, not just a privacy one

People file local-first under privacy, which is a soft, easy-to-ignore word. I think of it as security. When your audio and resume are processed on your own machine and never uploaded, there is no central database of user interviews to breach. There is no honeypot. An attacker who wants your data has to compromise your specific device, not a single server holding everyone's.

That is a structurally different risk profile. It does not depend on my company being perfect at security forever, which no company is. It depends on the data simply not being there to steal.

The line I will not cross

There is a version of this space that leans into helping people cheat and hide it. I will not build that, and not only because I run an education brand. Selling secrecy attracts exactly the incentives that end in a breach and a betrayed user base. I would rather win slowly on being trustworthy: your data stays on your machine, the claims are honest, and there is no shady database waiting to leak. That ages better than a growth chart.