I was looking forward to trying Sync today now that it’s live, but my enthusiasm was immediately dampened after seeing the “Data Safety” section on the Google Play store.
Liftoff has been great, and want to say thanks for making an awesome app. This will continue to be my daily driver.
Edit: for clarity, because the post got way bigger than I expected.
Sync looks like a fantastic app, and the dev/s should charge whatever they feel is fair for their efforts, even if that’s through the usual ads + ad tracking.
My intent was just to post here in /c/Liftoff to thank the Liftoff devs for managing to somehow offer an awesome app without any of that.
Do you know yourself for a fact that no data is being taken by Sync itself?
And its a fact that Google and Firebase are taking your data. Even if Sync itself doesn’t collect any data, it uses Google products (as stated in their Privacy Policy which I’m 1000% you did read), and any and all google products will take your data.
That’s the point of using a FOSS client, if it collected data people would know, the code is public. And the data collection can be removed, since the code is public.
Even outside of data collection or privacy, which clearly you don’t care about, we should avoid giving Google more power. Look at manifest v3 or the web integrity API. That affects not only your privacy, but your security and ability to use the internet. And not only yours, but the whole world
Yes. You might be surprised, but given how I control my own network, I don’t actually need access to the source code to discover if Sync is collecting data.
Unless you’re somehow worried about Sync collecting a ton of data and never sending it anywhere, which would be a ridiculous claim.
As for Google… Yeah, I’m sure on my Android device, the one where I sync my photos to Google Photos and my files to Google Drive, Sync is most definitely the way Google is collecting my data.
But just as an addendum, you’re indeed doubly wrong. When I enable my subscription, Sync only contacts Google when checking the subscription status. No crashlogs or similar data being shared here.
Well, you are just one of the (majority of) people who apparently don’t care about being tracked by google. Me personally, others in the comments and maybe OP don’t use anything google related, have custom ROMs without gapps and avoid Google like the plague. So it is a concern for us, using Sync would open the door to google tracking.
Others have pointed out that even if you pay for pro, Sync still requires Play Services.
You seem to happily Google products, so my point wouldn’t apply to you. I just thought that most people would be concerned about google and tracking and fingerprinting and all that stuff, since we are in Lemmy and the Liftoff sub.
No disagreements here. Notice how none of my comments in this entire chain oppose what you wrote.
Firebase is typically a dependency for key app features. If the app still works 100%, you’re probably not even blocking the traffic.
Using Google Drive/Photos is just another problem. Amazing to me people keep bringing that up like a “you’re a hypocrite” trump card.
You’re incorrect, the API isn’t even loaded for subscribers.
And no, for me using Google Photos isn’t a problem - it’s a really nice solution.
Subjectivity, isn’t it great?
What API isn’t loaded for subscribers? Firebase?
“It’s not a problem because I choose to ignore the downsides”