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
But you don’t actually know what code is running on a given lemmy server. Just because the source is open, doesn’t mean that any given server is using the reference implementation, admins could be running whatever they want on their backend.