51–60 of 99 posts
I've never understood why Weather apps are such a huge thing. I just type into Google "Weather" and it tells me that weather. If I was worried about privacy I'd bookmark the local government weather website. Why the need to install an app for a simple query? People are obsessed with them though, they're massively popular so I'm missing something.
I guess the absence of a "like" or review function in the f-droid app is a deliberate choice, but I'd love to see user feedback at a central, or at least easily discoverable, place.
This has been discussed [1],[2], and looks like it won't happen "officially", but a third-party site utilising the API and possibly organised like nexusmods, with posts and endorsements, say, would be nice to see!
1: https://forum.f-droid.org/t/reviews-feature-for-f-droid/1197...
2: https://forum.f-droid.org/t/discussion-thread-for-each-app-i...
The app is simply called Yr and they have a website where you can find the apps (bottom)[0]
It seems like a privacy respecting app shouldn't leave your privacy dependent on the ongoing and unwavering benevolence of the developer or the services their app uses. For a weather app that would mean not sending my location data anywhere, but also not sending the locations I want the weather for anywhere either since if you know that most of the time you'll be able to tell where I am or where I will be. The ideal…
Or, you could use cryptography.
Even if the traffic is encrypted if a remote server has to understand what location you're requesting data for, find that data for you, and then deliver it back to you, that same server will be able to log that and you're back to having to trust that they won't save and abuse that data.
I wonder how using an API that is under CC-BY-SA 4.0 [0] is considered an anti-feature. I mean, I understand what they want in f-droid with [1] but there should probably be some middle-ground for cases like this? [0] https://openweathermap.org/full-price#licenses [1] https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Anti-Features/#NonFreeNet
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Or, you could use cryptography.
> Or, you could use cryptography. Even if the traffic is encrypted if a remote server has to understand what location you're requesting data for, find that data for you, and then deliver it back to you, that same server will be able to log that and you're back to having to trust that they won't save and abuse that data.
It seems like a privacy respecting app shouldn't leave your privacy dependent on the ongoing and unwavering benevolence of the developer or the services their app uses. For a weather app that would mean not sending my location data anywhere, but also not sending the locations I want the weather for anywhere either since if you know that most of the time you'll be able to tell where I am or where I will be. The ideal…
But I really think that you can trust an app made by a German university not to sell your data. Not so sure about US universities though.
It seems like a privacy respecting app shouldn't leave your privacy dependent on the ongoing and unwavering benevolence of the developer or the services their app uses. For a weather app that would mean not sending my location data anywhere, but also not sending the locations I want the weather for anywhere either since if you know that most of the time you'll be able to tell where I am or where I will be. The ideal…
You can also do it with multiple, independently operated servers, as long as they don't collude with each other beyond a given threshold. Then the queries and responses can be kept small. The private info in the queries is split between the servers, and the responses are recombined, using methods inspired by Shamir secret sharing in cryptography. That prevents the servers from learning the actual queries being made or responses being sent.
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_information_retrieval#...
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Indeed. That's why I like the privacy cards on the iOS App Store a lot. For apps like this, it makes it really easy to spot the ones that'll record my location data on their servers for some reason. It's the same with fitness tracking apps, so many of them send health data to their servers, but there are a few (often paid ones, of course) that seem to store important data only locally.
>That's why I like the privacy cards on the iOS App Store a lot Donkeyd, I find the privacy cards in the iOS app store to be an unreliable source. I will read the relevant privacy policy stating 'data not collected' to mean anything but. Do you know if the card self-reporting?
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Sure, but I'm fine with sharing my data for that purpose. I also have an app that registers any possible earthquakes and shares that data with a centralized server for analysis. I'm perfectly fine with that, as long as they don't sell my data to anyone who wants to market earthquake safety equipment or wants to track my location. Transparency on the use of data is important to make decisions on this type of stuff. If…
"Privacy" has a nebulous definition, and I don't think many of us here have concerns about supplying anonymous data to help build useful systems. We need to re-frame the issue. Individual and aggregated environmental sensor data could be used for so many good things. We can track storms, fires and floods, earthquakes, air and noise pollution, and save lives. But it is abused by a greedy, unethical few, and so the sys…
Corruption always happens for a greedy, unethical few, but with the right technologies, we can make such abuse very costly. That hopefully, would restore trust from most users.