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Privacy Friendly Apps – improved privacy protection on the smartphone

secuso.aifb.kit.edu

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Re: Privacy Friendly Apps – improved privacy protection on the smartphone

#51

Post by JeremyNT »

butz wrote: post #28

Good initiative, but might be better idea to provide less apps with similar functionality and concentrate on one that actually works. I'm still searching for a decent privacy respecting (no internet, no sync, no google account required) app for simple reminders and notes, but neither of Secuso apps worked, mainly reminders in "To-Do-List" were not working at all. If anyone has made a simple reminder/note app, similar…

I've been using their QR scanner and had no idea it was part of a brisket initiative.

I think by having apps for so many use cases they may have better luck picking up enough users. I for one will be checking out the rest of their work based on that experience with the barcode scanner.

There's also something to be said for many small programs that do one thing well. See also the "Simple" suite of apps, which seem to have a similar philosophy.

Re: Privacy Friendly Apps – improved privacy protection on the smartphone

#52

Post by mdp2021 »

CursedUrn wrote: post #46
mdp2021 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What privacy issue do you see/know involved with GitHub?

Microsoft aren't exactly known for privacy, given how much data they collect continuously from Windows users (e.g. details on every application you launch, hard-drive wide program sweeps, etc). Also with Github specifically they used everyone's code to fuel their machine learning product without asking permission.

That GitHub may be related to non privacy-friendly actors does not make software hosted on GitHub lose any privacy-friendly quality.

Was it meant to be a "don't deal with those guys" stance? Practically, that would further force us as nomads.

Re: Privacy Friendly Apps – improved privacy protection on the smartphone

#53

Post by als0 »

jeroenhd wrote: post #48
als0 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You compile and install them using Xcode.

Doesn't that require repeated resigning/reinstalling to keep the apps installed? I've heard some iOS users complain about the stupid workarounds they need to do to install apps from unofficial sources and I'm pretty sure there's more to it than just installing the app from your computer.

If you have a paid developer account you have to reinstall every year. If you’re using a free account I think you have to do it every week. Not great, but also not harder than connecting your phone and pressing the Run button in Xcode.

Re: Privacy Friendly Apps – improved privacy protection on the smartphone

#54

Post by 0daystock »

kkfx wrote: post #9

A curious question: why caring about app privacy when the ecosystem they live in is designed to milk data? We do want only big&powerful being able to eavesdrop privacy but not countless of smaller actors? It might sound sterile polemics but it's not, I'm really curious how techies can talk about privacy on Android, iOS etc. My sole opinion there is just avoid using them.

This is it. There's no point to privacy "apps" on a platform with Google Play Services. You're just polishing brass on the Titanic.

Re: Privacy Friendly Apps – improved privacy protection on the smartphone

#56

Post by butz »

alephxyz wrote: post #38
butz wrote: post #28

Good initiative, but might be better idea to provide less apps with similar functionality and concentrate on one that actually works. I'm still searching for a decent privacy respecting (no internet, no sync, no google account required) app for simple reminders and notes, but neither of Secuso apps worked, mainly reminders in "To-Do-List" were not working at all. If anyone has made a simple reminder/note app, similar…

If your version of Android supports it, consider installing any app from the Play Store and disabling its internet access. I did that for Google keyboard since it's the only way to get proper swipe-typing.

Good call, but in some rare cases, like Google Keep, it won't work without internet connection.
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