Tesco cafe
Having a coffee and bacon sandwich in Tesco
Permanent linkWorking journal
Notes
What I’m building, testing, learning and thinking about.
No likes. No comments. No follower counts. No tracking. If something resonates, email me.
Five real devices in one house today: iPhone, iPad, Pixel, Samsung tablet and a Doro phone designed for older and visually impaired people.
With five present, the profiles appeared. Turn one device off and the remaining four returned to quiet mode—the identities disappeared. Turn it back on and the group reopened quickly.
Three difficult days of privacy work became visible in one very simple test.
The Doro also exposed an accessibility problem in onboarding. A useful reminder: privacy only matters if the person holding the phone can actually use it.
Permanent linkBluetooth gave us just 24 characters to work with.
We fitted DinkLink’s temporary presence and profile signals into those 24 characters, with a rotating session identity and a minimum-group privacy threshold.
A technical constraint became part of the privacy design.
Privacy shouldn’t only be a paragraph in a policy. It should be what the software refuses to reveal.
Permanent linkAfter more than a year of building, DinkLink reached both app stores.
It is deliberately small: Bluetooth only. No GPS. No messaging. No followers. No profiles stored on a server.
The difficult part wasn’t adding features. It was refusing the ones that would turn human presence into data.
Permanent linkDinkLink began with a contradiction I couldn’t leave alone.
Phones have made it easier to contact almost anyone—and harder to meet the person already in the room.
I wanted one small signal that said, “I’m open to meeting,” without GPS, followers, messaging or a permanent record.
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