What constitutes Usage Data. Is it sharing the posts I view, communities I subscribe to etc?
Does paying for a premium version stop this data being collected?
From DuckDuckGo:
For what it’s worth, I subscribed to Ultra about an hour ago and DDG hasn’t picked up any additional tracking attempts since then. I think it may be limited entirely to Google’s ad service for the free, ad-supported tier and maybe crash diagnostics that the app gives you the option of enabling or disabling.
I think that the lack of further attempts backs up what lj shared a bit ago in the Discord. That’s still a hell of a lot of tracking for folks who can’t or don’t want to pay, though.
Sure would be cool if this kind of information was provided outside of a proprietary service that not only requires a login but also you to join a specific server just to then have this be hidden by 1,500 random messages that you don’t care about. Shame there is no such place.
Can someone explain what this means. The ads/tracking is not activated in Sync for Lemmy? If so, why have it in the code.
Basically all tracking is done by Google ads. It checks at start up if you have purchased ad free or not. If purchased, launch app without ad library, else launch with ads. It has to be in the code because (according to the dev) Google is cracking down on similar apps, ie a pro version and a free version. So ad library has to be included, and it just won’t use it if you pay for pro
Makes sense, thanks. I think I misunderstood the comment I was replying to.
Ads removal is an in-app purchase. It is the same app/codebase whether you make the purchase or not.
FWIW that page is a bit deceptive , it’s not saying it’s collecting all of that data. The only info on that page is “146 tracking attempts from Google”, which makes sense if it has Google ads.
Please note that the long list of things collected is what Google is known to collect, not necessarily that these are the things being collected. If you click on any other app that is also with Google trackers (practically every app listed on this page), you will find that the stuff listed are the same.
deleted by creator
Can you explain more? Would DNS level blocking stop ads on a smart TV (for YouTube specifically) as well?
Not for youtube, you can use smarttube for android tv. It has everything, like sponsorblock etc
Tracker blocking youtube results in new videos not adding to your history, recommendations freezing permanently, youtube just regurgitates the same stuff and seemingly never refreshes
deleted by creator
I used ubiquiti’s dns level ad/tracker blocker
Effects were on every device and app except firefox - especially on smart TVs
deleted by creator
Firefox tends to use dns over https by default, bypassing any dns level tracker blocking
They are talking about on a smart TV.
deleted by creator
Can confirm, pihole blocks nearly all ads on smart TVs and apps.
I would really love to know what ads are targeting low battery levels. Chargers and battery packs obviously. But I wonder what else being at 5% tells you about a person 😅
Could be device fingerprinting
Behavioral data at least. When and how person charges phone, how much they use phone and what times.
Wtf
Btw, what duckduckgo app is this? Not their browser?
It is their browser. The tracking protection is in their browser and tells Android that it’s a VPN.
I found it! I thanks.
Side note, no tracking from sync has showed up for me so far.
I also don’t see any weird activity on my adguard logs after subscribing to Ultra.
Mother of God!
Ik right! Just Google being Google
Doesn’t this ad/subscription model, go against the grain a bit? With Lemmy & the fediverse in general, being an opensource environment, which has no ads, & funded by donations, rather than a subscription model…
No, it doesn’t. Unlike Reddit, Twitter, or Threads, Lemmy offers a variety of apps. There are so many that there is something for everyone. Even a “professional” app that finances itself with advertising or a subscription is allowed. The special thing about Lemmy is the freedom of choice.
deleted by creator
Funding your project with donations is just not a realistic long-term goal. This is why so many instances fold up shop in just a couple of weeks as their servers are overloaded and no one donates money to keep it up.
Capitalism is a problem but it doesn’t mean everything has to be socialism. There can be an in-between.
Capitalism is a problem but it doesn’t mean everything has to be socialism. There can be an in-between.
It’s not even that to be honest. Socialism is characterized by worker ownership and operation of companies primarily. LJ is a sole proprietor exploiting nobody, not earning a wage via labor and not having to work because he under pays others to work for him. He’s just a worker like the rest of us.
I definitely agree that donations is not a viable long term path. Maybe in a different economic model. People need to be realistic. The general arguments they are making against Sync in favor of FOSS apps can also be made against them using FOSS apps by the FLOSS folks. People should pay if they can. And use a free third party app if they can’t, or don’t like how sync works.
I really don’t get the hate people are putting out there over this. This is why third party apps build strong ecosystems. You can find what you want.
You are mixing socialism and communism.
You’re right
I believe its possible, at least coming from the minecraft world. if the instance doesnt grow as big as lemmy.world or something then you can ask for patrons and other ways to get donations. a lot of the plugins I use for my minecraft servers are run this way and its the way i run my server, I just ask for a dollar donation if possible from my players and that covers a little bit more than what the server costs me to run. when I check some of the plugin’s patreon page they pull in about 1k-8k a month
https://www.patreon.com/coreprotectdeleted by creator
The reddit gold model didn’t work. Reddit was a VC funded start up though, so if was expected to make a lot more than just enough to keep the servers going.
I’d bet lemmy instances can get by on donations and reddit style awards. Like you say, it can be incentivized further with cosmetic rewards.
deleted by creator
That’s a good point. The federation part makes it trickier.
Even if it was socialism, that doesn’t mean money doesn’t exist lol, there would have to be some kind of tax added on for everyone to support the product/project/whatever.
We have socialized fire departments in America, does that mean they don’t get paid and work for free? Nah, but you don’t get a bill before they put the fire out on your house either
Socialism doesn’t mean free.
You’re free to use any app you want. Some people prefer free open-source apps, some people want to pay for a quality app. It’s good to have a choice unlike with Reddit. I don’t understand people complaining about having additional choice because they don’t like it.
Some people want to keep the Fediverse ecosystem completely pure in terms of free software, and they will yell at you if you don’t play along.
Removed by mod
Some people do give stuff away for free or donate their time. “Nothing in life is free” would only be true if everyone was a die-hard capitalist.
Removed by mod
deleted by creator
I would one time pay for this, but a subscription feels meh.
There are plenty of apps for Lemmy, that aren’t supported by ads, nor should they be, given the whole ethos of the fediverse…
I really like Connect for Lemmy! And it’s Canadian!
Connect is really nice, as are Canadians👍🏼
The ethos of the fediverse (insofar as it’s completely free with no ads) won’t be sustainable at scale; income for continued development and support does need to be taken into account at some point, and that goes for servers, frontends, apps, etc. Funding from donations only gets you so far. We will have to talk about it some day.
However, it is entirely too soon for ads and subscriptions. This feels openly and brazenly like talking advantage of Sync overly enthusiastic fanclub and the Sync name recognition. Get in early with a big name and start making money before any other big name apps like Boost are released.
Funding from donations only gets you so far.
Then maybe that’s as far as we should go?
Wikipedia makes it work.
You’d be surprised to hear that wikipedia’s main income is from their major benefactors like amazon, google, and other organizations. Donations from individual people make up a small portion of their income.
https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2020-annual-report/donors/#section-2
Another example would be lichess.org , which manages to compete with chess.com (a comercial site) and even pays the main developer a salary. All based purely on donations.
I think it can definitely work even in the long run.
Too soon, being taken advantage of?
The developer has a track record, we already know the product being delivered and the terms.
The fan base are the people who were already using Sync for Reddit.
The people who like me had used Sync for Reddit since 2017. Sync always had ads and the inherent tracking, I paid 2.69€ in Jan 2017 to remove ads and support the development.
(When In 2022 the developer added another support level where you had access to early betas, I paid again 4.99€, because I’m an early adopter and wanted to support again because I never went the subscription route)
I have also setup a monthly donation towards my Lemmy instance.
It might feel too soon because Ljdawson moves fast.
I feel like as long as your home instance can keep alive with donations then it will scale well. If your home instance starts needing a subscription or shows ads you could always migrate elsewhere. (But that’s a pain I have already done that)
People have been saying some variant of “the fediverse won’t work at scale if it stays free and without ads” for a decade now. And yet it keeps growing despite remaining free and without ads.
What scale is it at and what scale are we comparing it to? For Lemmy the comparison is reddit, and there is absolutely no way donations would cover the sheer cost of compute required to compete with a user base of that size.
I’m not going to bother looking into the numbers but I’m thinking all of the fediverse together doesn’t even come close to that user base.
lemmy.world has frequent outages that last most of the day. It wouldn’t say its exactly smooth sailing
There is now a one time payment of $20 usd ($30 cad) to remove ads, an ongoing $20 cad a year subscription for ad free + additional services, or a one time, $99 usd payment for lifetime access to ad free + pro services.
So a nice selection!
I don’t have an issue with a reasonable subscription, but hard pass on trackers, especially when you’re paying.
Not defending tracking or anything, but you do not get trackers if you pay. This tracker is just for ads, which you don’t get if you pay.
The issue for me is having the code. If I pay, I want an app without the ads/trackers code.
The code isn’t run, so who cares?
I care as having it or not is two different situations. It had a layer of protection without it.
That’s true, but according to the Dev Google is cracking down on devs having two versions of an app (i.e. a basic ad-supported version and a pro ad-free version) and I believe if you want an app on the Google store it has to have to ad code in it. That last part I’m not sure if that only applies to apps that will have ads in them.
But, the dev doesn’t comply with gdpr. It’s opt-out by default what is not the case.
So to access the payment, you have to share private and personal datas. This isn’t fine at all. He should offer the option to buy without being tracked.
Yep lol. IDC how good your app is if I don’t know what’s it doing with my data I’m not paying!
I hope there will be a pro version where you can pay to opt out of all ad and track nonsense.
laughs in Voyager PWA
LJ was very adamant about not collecting or keeping any user data under the reddit regime. I’m happy giving him the benefit of the doubt here.
The point is we don’t formally know.
The dev has stated that the tracking is disabled if ads are disabled, and other users have confirmed that via duckduckgo.
Hope this works but here’s what ddg is showing me was blocked. Only Google attempted to track and it was only once before I purchased ultra. Basically everything Google already knows about anyone using android.
TIL the DuckDuckGo app protection, thanks!
What’s that app you’re using to see that info?
It’s duckduckgo private browser. It does more than just browsing, there’s an app tracking protection feature.
Jesus!
Yea but does that prevent Google from getting that data via AdMob?
Removing ads via IAP or the Sync Ultra subscription eliminates that data sharing.
Per the dev, responding to my question in the discord server just now.
Why are the responses to all these questions happening in Discord rather than the official Sync Lemmy channel? 🤔
The Discord is just as official as this community?
Discord is a closed garden, it’s awful for things like this.
Discord is great for things like this. For simple questions, Discord is better than reddit or Lemmy.
I can’t google and find the answer to these simple questions. Discord is inherently worse than an open forum for that reason. It shouldn’t be used for Support or updates at all.
Yes, i do enjoy searching my way through 5648 shit posts with the keyword of a problem i’m trying to solve.
So the only way you can avoid that is to ask the same question which was already answered 10 times by the same person over the last couple of weeks.
What a great way to troubleshoot
Because it’s the official Discord, and it’s been around far longer than Sync for Lemmy? What kind of question is that even?
Because he’s busy? Not everyone is terminally online
There’s a discord?!
Alwayshasbeen.meme
Btw pro tip: you can insert the literal meme as Lemmy supports image/gif posting ;)
deleted by creator
This showing up right? It’s a tiny circle on kbin mobile. Sorry if I blew up your notifications while I tried figuring this out.
deleted by creator
Blindly trusting someone are the people that usually fall for scams
“Benefit of the doubt” does not mean “blindly trust”…?
Listen you can do what you want if you feel your privacy is being violated, but this particular developer is not scamming anyone. He has an established history of not giving a fuck about your user data, which is backed up by other users verifying that the data tracking ends when ads are removed.
To be fair yes, the developer does have a reputation but the app isn’t open source so you can’t fully verify anything.
You can directly analyze the calls the app is making so you can fully verify it even without the source code.
Stop spreading technical misinformation.
Lol Whatever floats your boat 🤷♂️
Lol mr computer science engineer
Trusting someone based on your previous experience with them and or a reputation they’ve earned, however is one of the cornerstones of society.
There’s nothing blind about it. I can see what trackers are being attempted on each app on my phone and sync stopped as soon as I purchased ultra.
So in other words, you’re making a blanket statement without any contextually relevant examples to support it. Almost like youre just fear mongering and don’t have an actual argument. Got it.
Since it’s admob my guess is it’s Google analytics. Which means everything you look at or touch, but it’s probably as much for the developer so they can see how users are reacting to the app layout and designs.
The developer should move to an open source platform for analytics if this bothers users.
GA can only collect what you specifically give it (clicks, touches, hovers…etc), so the developer should be able to be very specific here. Using GA by default only collects very basic impression info.
Usage data🗿
it’s whatever admob collects, check their policy
Use a duckduckgo tracker blocker. It’ll show you what trackers it has and what they typically collect.
This can be deceiving for link aggregator apps, because it’ll also pick up trackers that other sites are using, and not the app itself.
In addition as the earlier reply mentions – “typically” collect. It has no knowledge of the data I believe. Simply what tracker is used and what it can be used for. Good for who, but not for what.
deleted by creator
Aside from this, I just spent 10 minutes removing consent for advertising/cookies/tracking/whatever for about 100 different vendors. I really hope I don’t need to do that again, ever.
How did you do this?
Only Europeans can do it because Europe passed laws for this.
Sync didn’t prompt me at all and I’m from the eu.
I was prompted to consent to some stuff, which I unchecked. Then there was a “vendor preferences” button, where they were basically saying “ok, even if you don’t consent, maybe you still wanna give them access if they have a legitimate interest”. So since I have also a legitimate interest in not giving my data to shady fucking companies, I spent the next 10 minutes removing ticks from boxes basically, because fuck giving me a choice to “uncheck all”, that would make it too easy to opt out.
Edit: and then to make it even more fun, I found a button somewhere in settings where I could remove my consent for gdpr-related reasons. So I clicked it. You wanna guess what it did? If you’re guessing it removed my consent, sorry - it actually removed my “lack of consent” - that is to say, it reset the settings and prompted me to uncheck everything again. Cool beans.
Saving this for later to see if there’s a response.
Yeah, I saw this too when I went to download, and this bothers me a little bit. None of the other Lemmy apps I use collect my data.
Is this decision set in stone?
The data is less about what you are personally doing and more things like which device does a user have, which country is a user from, how often do they use the app, and how often do they click on ads.
You can dig more into what admob means by usage data here: https://support.google.com/admob/answer/9263723
Will you be able to one-time-pay beforehand? Before all these trackers take effect or will they still stay after the purchase? Pretty hard to consider a non-FOSS app that tracks you even if you pay. Might be great for lemmy’s adoption but not for the fediverse’ spirit.
deleted by creator
Spez 🤬
making sure the migration goes well lol
All the tracking code is in the ads library which isn’t loaded after paying to remove ads.
I subscribed to Ultra and hasn’t seen any weird activity on my Adguard logs. I guess the what the dev said about the ad SDK not being initialized when you subscribe is true.
Some quick search engine magic led me here: https://levelup.gitconnected.com/filling-out-the-app-privacy-section-in-app-store-connect-for-admob-users-bca0768ad86e
Same search engine magic should come up similar results for the Amazon usage data too
Hi All. I am next to illiterate in tracking /ads protection, so please advise: would Adguard disable all that mess? I was a paying user of Sync for Reddit, and will likely pay for this version as well if it is as polished, but i do have a nasty paranoia (or just a healthy desire to maintain my privacy, depending on one’s views) and am on a quest to disable as much of tracking as possible wherever I can .
I use adguard and everywhere that an ad was supposed to be it just said “sponsored content” lol. I paid for the ad free anyway because I like the dev and don’t mind supporting him
They gonna take anything they can sell. Grow up.
