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.

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Drone (quadcopter) suggestions? (lemm.ee)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by iturnedintoanewt@lemm.ee to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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Hi guys! Back in the day I bought a DJI Mavic (1st gen) for my travels, when they were not so absolutely obnoxious about sending ALL your flight logs back to the motherland. As the obnoxiousness increased, I ended up installing a CFW (Merlin, I think) on the drone, so I could fly unrestricted and with no logged-in account on the phone (custom modded app), with the app requiring no callback to any server. But seems these days the drone is increasingly misbehaving. Might be due to old age, but it tends to not detect obstacles at all, and also doesn't detect the floor, so landing is...hairy.

So I'd like to have some sort of replacement, hopefully with similar flying aids (GPS positioning and obstacle detection at least, more are welcome), and hopefully smaller & foldable... but without the need to call home at every damn time. Is this possible? What are the recommendations these days? Can newer DJI drones be modded in the same manner? Are the alternatives?

Thanks!

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[–] ahal@lemmy.ca 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Mozilla's privacy not included guide reviews three drones: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/categories/toys-games/

No idea if those are what you're looking for, but perhaps you can get an idea of the practices those 3 companies do in general (one of them is DJI so would be good for comparison so least)

[–] iturnedintoanewt@lemm.ee 4 points 11 months ago

Thanks...As a DJI owner myself, I pretty much know how much it wanted to phone home. After some update of the app, the drone would not fly if it didn't at least check home once every month or so. And it forcefully updated the drone so it would reject the drone from taking off. And it would expire the login on the older app if you wanted to keep it, so you were pushed in all directions towards a phone-home-based model. It wasn't this way in the beginning, and after some initial checks, the app could be kept offline. But after I got burnt with after-sales practices, I'd rather keep other models in mind. Or at least one that is easy to hack and forget.