why is personal information required to test it online?

[BBC-Esq]

Speaking of knowledge sharing, why when I visit your website and click "get started" does it require me to share my gmail account name and other personal information? Can't we just test out this interesting approach without having our information scraped and put in some database somewhere? Just food for thought, thanks.

[amir2628]

@BBC-Esq
I think the most interesting part about using this system is the terms of service. 😯

They possibly meant that they would use our inputs to possibly train their models and such. But what if someone has an idea that can lead to a patent or something like that? 😞 In the end, researchers are the main users of this service. 👨🏼‍🔬

❓ Would they steal it and try to publish and sell it as their own?
Thoughts? 💭

[shaoyijia]

Thanks for the discussion! As a research prototype, we launch the online demo for free with research purpose (please check out the Consent Form before use). We fully understand your concern and encourage you to host STORM locally following our README.md if you don't want the data to be collected. The output quality would be the same.

[BBC-Esq]

Personally, I don't mind them using my searches themselves for research purposes. It's the cost of such a cool free service, but the requirement of personal information is completely unnecessary. Anyways, @shaoyijia I just submitted a pull request for a duckduckgo search example, which I noticed you didn't have.

[shaoyijia]

Thanks! Just for clarification:

but the requirement of personal information is completely unnecessary

The personal information is not stored and cannot be accessed by the research team for any purpose. It's only used for authentication in order to protect the web service.