Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

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READ THE TOS! lol (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 days ago by lunatique@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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In order to protect your privacy even more efficiently, you need to do something very simple whenever using an online service or a software. Something that most people fail to do is reading the terms of service, also known as a TOS, from companies or developers' software. This usually will tell you straight up whether they're spying on you, selling your data, or using it to sell ads. This will solve a lot of problems with people not realizing that some software is actually the opposite of privacy, but they keep using it thinking it enhances their privacy.

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[–] utopiah@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 days ago

I did not say it was always bad :

if an app is not present on it, it’s rarely because technically it can’t, it’s often because of anti-patterns.

So we agree. What sparked this reasoning though was https://github.com/Mentra-Community/MentraOS/issues/1168 which as you can see squarely fits in that pattern, namely :

interesting open-source project targeting Android
not focusing on distributing via F-Droid
upon checking how to do so, discover that beside their available bandwidth, their current choices is not compatible with F-Droid.

I think it's a great example because it shows that developers themselves might not be aware of the consequence of their choices on privacy. This very project is about augmented reality and the value they try to demonstrate is that, unlike Meta for example, they do care about privacy. Yet, in practice, they do rely on Google components that do share data back.

So sure, I didn't say nor do I think ALL projects missing from F-Droid are because they have anti patterns... but more often than not they do.

PS: also noticed WireGuard is like that too. They force upgrades via their own distribution system and AFAICT F-Droid insists that it's up to the user to upgrade if they want to. It's a hard stance and it has consequences, e.g. maybe some people on F-Droid do not get WireGuard official app, maybe they get a less secure one, maybe they get it out of F-Droid and side-step the anti-pattern ... but it's also understandable.