Third-Party Software: Should You Start from the Bottom Up?

As a developer, you can run into all sorts of problems on a project that can really get under your skin as you think on a solution for hours, days, or weeks. Often these problems can be solved if you delve deeper into the programming language you are using, the APIs that are provided for you, and the documentation available, but often-times you can find yourself in a spot where you can’t spend that much time on a problem before another one comes up. You’re tired, you want a relief from this roadblock, and there seems to be no end in sight for the things you are facing.

You aren’t an idiot, so you try to google your problems away. It is very likely that the problem you ran into has already been solved by some other developer somewhere else in the world. And, more often than not, you are right. Forums are filled with people that have already asked (and answered) the questions you have about a specific problem. Places like Stack Overflow contain questions and answers for an endless variety of languages, platforms, hardswares, etc., and that is likely the last stop for a majority of people who do not know how to solve a problem right way. However, a lot of the time you want to have variety in your application, and have code that can solve most (if not all) future problems that you might have on the project.

Third-party software provides that kind of relief. Large entities like Facebook and Google provide frameworks that you can add to pretty much any project to make your life simpler and easier to get your job done. These add-ons can increase the functionality of your application ten-fold, all while reducing the time to implement many functions that users have become used to in a modern application.

However, there is a problem. Many of these services, especially the ones coming from the larger companies, frequently phone home. Tracking has become common place because of these things. Have you ever searched Google for medical advice, purchasing decisions, or research into any particular subject? Well, Facebook, among many many other companies, probably know about that. Regardless of whether or not you use these services, these plug-ins create a profile of each user that can be followed from cookies, saved in a database, and called up whenever someone wants to review your credit score or determine how much your insurance should be.

This is something that cannot be explained away. These tools are so widespread because these companies are in the business of selling personal information. We view them as cool frameworks that are avaiable for free to anyone who has the knowledge to implement them, but is it worth adding functionality at the expense of your user’s privacy? Take a look at the problems you are facing and think about whether or not it might be better to create a solution by yourself instead of defaulting to an unknown framework with pretty animations. Yes, it will be harder. But in this privacy conscious world, it’s really the best thing we can do to provide our users peace of mind. If you are going to do it, make you you narrow down the field before choosing them, and be conscious of the data you are handling.