Monica, The Personal Relationship Manager

For those new to Monica, it’s a website that allows you to manage your personal relationships. You create contacts and provide information to make sure your encounters are meaningful and frequent (if that’s something you care about). You can add information about the contact’s significant other, their kids, where they might work, gifts, debts, social media accounts, birthdays, reminders, and even diets. In our busy minds, it can be hard to keep track of so many relevant details, and being human, we sometimes fall short of having great personal interactions with others. A friend’s birthday might be forgotten, we might not check in with our mom as frequently as we’d like, and our conversations might not indicate that we truly care about what is going on in a friend’s life if we’ve forgotten to follow up on the latest major events in their life. These mishaps might not be overtly bad, but they can prevent us from having truly connected relationships. Who wouldn’t want better relationships?

What’s better, is that Monica open-sources its code and emphasizes privacy. When it’s suggested that you aren’t being tracked and that your data isn’t being sold — a significant promise in an age where everybody is out for your data — it is verifiable.

I was initially pulled toward the platform, but two pieces of anecdata really spoke to me and cemented my feelings enough to try it out:

1) danielvf from Hacker News writes:

My uncle died suddenly this year. He was unbelievably caring - and not just to family - but to everyone he ever met. His funeral was jam packed with everyone from homeless people to executives of multi-billion dollar companies.

I always thought that his ability to always have you, and whatever you had last talked about with him, on his mind at any moment was some kind of supernatural gift. I was surprised to find out at his funeral that he actually kept an excel spreadsheet of everyone he met and what they needed and were going through. He reviewed this constantly.

It didn’t lessen his genuine love for everyone, just let him be a little more super human.

2) In the book How to Win Friends and Influence People, a tip for getting the most out of the book is suggested:

The president of an important Wall Street bank once described, in a talk before one of my classes, a highly efficient system he used for self-improvement. This man had little formal schooling; yet he had become one of the most important financiers in America, and he confessed that he owed most of his success to the constant application of his homemade system. This is what he does, I’ll put it in his own words as accurately as I can remember.

“For years I have kept an engagement book showing all the appointments I had during the day. My family never made any plans for me on Saturday night, for the family knew that I devoted a part of each Saturday evening to the illuminating process of self-examination and review and appraisal. After dinner I went off by myself, opened my engagement book, and thought over all the interviews, discussions and meetings that had taken place during the week. I asked myself:

‘What mistakes did I make that time?’ ‘What did I do that was right and in what way could I have improved my performance?’ ‘What lessons can I learn from that experience?’ “I often found that this weekly review made me very unhappy. I was frequently astonished at my own blunders. Of course, as the years passed, these blunders became less frequent. Sometimes I was inclined to pat myself on the back a little after one of these sessions. This system of self-analysis, self-education, continued year after year, did more for me than any other one thing I have ever attempted. “It helped me improve my ability to make decisions - and it aided me enormously in all my contacts with people. I cannot recommend it too highly.” Why not use a similar system to check up on your application of the principles discussed in this book? If you do, two things will result. First, you will find yourself engaged in an educational process that is both intriguing and priceless. Second, you will find that your ability to meet and deal with people will grow enormously.

I think I could use Monica as a tool for holding myself accountable when engaging with others, in a consistent, meaningful way. Monica could also facilitate the sort of introspection noted above, with its journal, activity, and reminder features. But while this is hugely appealing, I have some concerns. What if there was a breach?

Monica in the Crosshairs

A breach would be very dangerous. Arguably Monica stores more information (not data) than Facebook. Where a picture on Facebook might represent an event, its participants, and its location, this is described in plaintext on Monica, making it easier to draw insights. A computer can parse this text much more easily than images. Additionally, since Monica is a privacy-oriented social manager, there is more of a feeling of personal security, which could likely result in far more personal disclosure, or in other words, the willful release of more intimate details. In some sense, this makes users more vulnerable, personally, if there ever is such a breach. For those that want to draw parallels to encrypted messaging apps, I think the average person is going to write the same content in an SMS as they will a Signal message, and even if not, as of right now these encrypted-messaging apps are far more secure, so the targeting is less of a concern. I will, however, draw parallels to Facebook, because even though Monica isn’t a social network, it is in many ways comparable, and can serve many of Facebook’s primary functions.

Notes of private conversations by definition aren’t shared on Facebook, but could be on Monica. Details of a relative or friend in a hospital could be implicitly and explicitly exploited. Drug addiction? Financial or spousal trouble? These are all negatives that could be taken advantage of, or could form the basis of a spear-phishing campaign. Even general data like a user’s workplace is often faked on Facebook, but on a platform like Monica, people will probably be more inclined to submit honest data.

Many people first joined Facebook because they wanted to keep track of friends and family in the way Monica does. Facebook largely shifted, became less trustworthy, and became more superficial in users’ eyes. A social manager that is open-sourced and private (where people are actually themselves and don’t self-censor), is an awesome alternative to something like Facebook. Unfortunately, the platform still has an http version that is usable, and the platform still lacks 2FA. These issues will likely be remedied soon, as security is the developer’s priority (along with data exporting). Less-savvy users will have to wait for these remedies. Technically proficient users, however, have more options due to Monica being open-source. The growing community has already developed installers for the platform (on Heroku and Docker); users can have much more power over their data by installing Monica on a server they manage. Though this is a good start, it is still worth exploring these considerations before committing large amounts of personal information to a web platform that may be extra prone to being targeted. I’m sure more is to come as the platform scales, and I would still easily choose Monica over other platforms any day. I just think users should be at least a little conscious of what kind of data they’re adding to their page, without assuming it will be perfectly secure.