Privacy Guides
In the digital age, protecting your personal information might seem like an impossible task. We’re here to help.
This is a community for sharing news about privacy, posting information about cool privacy tools and services, and getting advice about your privacy journey.
You can subscribe to this community from any Kbin or Lemmy instance:
Check out our website at privacyguides.org before asking your questions here. We've tried answering the common questions and recommendations there!
Want to get involved? The website is open-source on GitHub, and your help would be appreciated!
This community is the "official" Privacy Guides community on Lemmy, which can be verified here. Other "Privacy Guides" communities on other Lemmy servers are not moderated by this team or associated with the website.
Moderation Rules:
- We prefer posting about open-source software whenever possible.
- This is not the place for self-promotion if you are not listed on privacyguides.org. If you want to be listed, make a suggestion on our forum first.
- No soliciting engagement: Don't ask for upvotes, follows, etc.
- Surveys, Fundraising, and Petitions must be pre-approved by the mod team.
- Be civil, no violence, hate speech. Assume people here are posting in good faith.
- Don't repost topics which have already been covered here.
- News posts must be related to privacy and security, and your post title must match the article headline exactly. Do not editorialize titles, you can post your opinions in the post body or a comment.
- Memes/images/video posts that could be summarized as text explanations should not be posted. Infographics and conference talks from reputable sources are acceptable.
- No help vampires: This is not a tech support subreddit, don't abuse our community's willingness to help. Questions related to privacy, security or privacy/security related software and their configurations are acceptable.
- No misinformation: Extraordinary claims must be matched with evidence.
- Do not post about VPNs or cryptocurrencies which are not listed on privacyguides.org. See Rule 2 for info on adding new recommendations to the website.
- General guides or software lists are not permitted. Original sources and research about specific topics are allowed as long as they are high quality and factual. We are not providing a platform for poorly-vetted, out-of-date or conflicting recommendations.
Additional Resources:
- EFF: Surveillance Self-Defense
- Consumer Reports Security Planner
- Jonah Aragon (YouTube)
- r/Privacy
- Big Ass Data Broker Opt-Out List
view the rest of the comments
Even if it were true (it is not: there are techniques like static analysis, intercepting client-server communication, etc., that can confirm application behavior), how is having “zero expectations of privacy with closed source apps as you cannot independently verify what they [sic] app is doing” relevant when the source is available?
Why do you say their actions were illegal? In every repository of theirs that I looked through (just app (formerly web), server, self-hosted, mobile, and desktop), the contributors on every single PR that had been merged was from someone in the org. Unless there are some other contributions that I’m unaware of, their license change was completely legal.
There are tons of community created plugins, e.g., for editors (heck, I created and maintain one) but the licenses on those haven’t been changed and aren’t impacted. For any plugin that’s bundled with SN, an AGPL license can be a problem, and I didn’t check the contributions on their plugins, so maybe there’s an issue there and that’s what you’re saying is illegal? If those are still licensed as AGPL my understanding is that’s still legally allowed when they’re doing it, so long as there are no community contributors.
Personally I don’t understand how moving away from AGPL could accomplish their goals - AGPL already prevents another company from forking their server, changing the code, and not distributing those changes to their users… is the concern that some major companies are doing that and charging for it or using it internally? But regardless, being source available instead of FOSS doesn’t impact privacy expectations.
In fact, the way SN handles this is much better than the way Signal does, even though Signal uses a FOSS license. With Signal, development takes place in a private repository and it is later (sometimes as much as a year later) merged to the public one. My point is, the license isn’t the only thing that matters.
In terms of impact on contributions from the community - well, given that there haven’t been any, there won’t be an impact to the server or app repos. But I could see this impacting the willingness of the community to continue to build and maintain plugins.
Even if what they're doing is legal, it still has a negative impact on the privacy community. F-droid no longer providing Standard Notes builds is going to cut off people from using this app's updates going forward. It may end up being relegated to the IzzyOnDroid repo, but still not everyone uses that.
At least Signal provides a method outside of F-droid for automatic updates.
Good point. I’m not sure if IzzyOnDroid considers the CC license to be “free as in freedom” but even if they do, they allegedly have a 30 MB limit per application, and the most recent SN apk is just under 100 MB.
Signal’s approach is useful if the goal is to avoid being tracked by Google without losing out on the convenience of auto-upgrades, but it’s still bad in that they could theoretically introduce a client-side vulnerability that nobody external would have a chance to audit.
You can also use Standard Notes via the web app, which can be installed as a PWA. And even though it’s not FOSS anymore, the source is at least kept up to date.