Your analogy should be narrowed according to the facts of this case. Assuming that the author's guesses about the app's behavior are correct, this is a case of software checking for one specific tool — a tool that's strongly associated with piracy. A defendant in the physical world wouldn't necessarily have a reasonable expectation of privacy if there were indications that he or she was engaging in unlawful conduct. So it's unfair to say the app's behavior would be obviously illegal or that it's comparable to a secret inventory of all of someone's physical items. That said, I'm not justifying the hijacking of the author's Twitter. That's not an appropriate remedy by any standard.
It's one thing to have other people learn that you own a crowbar. It's another thing to have someone else declare, using your name, that you've used that crowbar for breaking into houses.
Interesting concept and I like the design. My only suggestion is to consider drawing in users a little more before prompting them to give personal info via the Google sign in. Maybe this could be accomplished by connecting some kind of interactive demo of an experiment to the "Try it now" button. In any case, I was interested in the site when I clicked "Try it now;" I just wasn't quite hooked enough to give up my info at that point.
Thanks for the suggestion, and I agree - it's definitely something I'd like to improve, but since I do this for fun in my free time I have limited time and try to focus on the science / data-analysis side. Thankfully Sina was kind enough to make it look much better.
So you're saying you didn't actually read the entire article... The data in the last 75% of the article were based on 70,000 organic signups split by beta/post-beta users.
