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?

  • fisco™🇬🇧🇺🇦@lemmy.mlEnglish
    442·
    11 months ago

    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…

    • peterpan520@feddit.deEnglish
      193·
      11 months ago

      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.

        • deweydecibel@lemmy.mlEnglish
          101·
          11 months ago

          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.

          • Kichae@kbin.social
            4·
            11 months ago

            Funding from donations only gets you so far.

            Then maybe that’s as far as we should go?

            Wikipedia makes it work.

          • novettam@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
            2·
            11 months ago

            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.

          • _spiffy@lemmy.caEnglish
            1·
            11 months ago

            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)

          • janWilejan@kbin.social
            0·
            11 months ago

            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.

            • njinx@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              11 months ago

              lemmy.world has frequent outages that last most of the day. It wouldn’t say its exactly smooth sailing

    • Michal@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      12·
      11 months ago

      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.

      • Kayn@dormi.zoneEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        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.

    • HughJanus@lemmy.mlEnglish
      166·
      11 months ago

      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.

      • glockenspiel@lemmy.worldEnglish
        101·
        11 months ago

        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.

      • variants@possumpat.ioEnglish
        3·
        11 months ago

        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/coreprotect

        https://www.patreon.com/sonicether

          • cooper@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            2·
            11 months ago

            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.

    • Bobby Bandwidth@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      11 months ago

      I don’t have an issue with a reasonable subscription, but hard pass on trackers, especially when you’re paying.

      • monkey@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        11 months ago

        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.

    • SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      11 months ago

      My go-to analogy is Usenet. Back when usenet basically was the internet for a lot of people, you’d have access to a usenet server through your school, isp, or with a separate subscription to a usenet provider. Usenet itself was free and there were open source implementations of the client and server side components. There were also commercial implementations. The important thing was that net news ran on an open protocol that no company owned. Companies and individuals were free to do what they wanted.

      I would not hesitate to buy a client that achieved the functionality of Apollo, or even Alien Blue. I didn’t really start using reddit until I had a good client, and I can see client-side issues being a hurdle to lemmy adoption. I’d prefer paying for a client over ad support. Still, the free and open source client community should be core going forward. I can even see the potential for a commercial server, once the community reaches critical mass in terms of content.

      I’ve been involved with the foss community since my first linux install back in like 1994 or so. I remember when rms and esr were household names, so long as your household was a dorm room with cs majors. Like with linux (gnu/linux?) commercial and foss apps can co-exist, and like with linux there should remain a foss purist option in addition to the mixed mode option.

      I don’t think the fediverse is facing a threat of commercial takeover - certainly not the lemmyverse. If anything, the threat is not onboarding enough people to be competitive with whatever reddit clone manages to launch in the next year or so, and which has the commercial backing to drive users to the service and have stable, scalable, and production quality code.

      • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2·
        11 months ago

        Just imagine: Microsoft creating a lemmy.xbox.com and creating centralized gaming communities like [email protected] or [email protected] instead of hosting it on discord or reddit.

        The only issue I see with it are:

        • Liability: They would probably need to disable signups for external users and only allow federation And even then user submitted stuff could be tricky. Tbf (in a halo example I am familiar) they run forums so idk…
        • Ease of use: Lemmy is not easy to understand for aunt Emma or uncle Smitherson. Heck even regular parents are probably overwhelmed by the selection of communities on reddit…
        • Anything else?
        • SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1·
          11 months ago

          I totally get that. I watched in real time when MS tried to kill Netscape by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows and used their “embrace and extend” business model to try to reserve the web for their proprietary browser. Ot didn’t work, but there was a lot of pushback both legally and socially.

          I think that we don’t have to worry about MS coming in for a while. I am interested to see how Facebook makes things work if and when they integrate Threads, but afaik no one is in an analogous position in terms of making a commercial, reddit-like experience tied to the fediverse.

          I mean, reddit’s model isn’t that great. They filed for an IPO on Dec 21 for $15B and since then have been marked down to about $5B, and that was before the APIpocalypse. That means that a) all of the current institutional and VC investors lost about 2/3 of their money and that spez and company have similarly seen their ineptitude slash their dreams of Musk-like wealth, and b) value-wise, they’re heading back to 2019 when they were smaller. It’s a terrible time for them to try doing an IPO. The fact that they haven’t pulled it makes it feel like they know the game of musical chairs is winding up and they just want to get out with even a quarter of what they expected.

        • Dharkstare@kbin.social
          11·
          11 months ago

          This was my thought as well. It makes sense for companies to setup their own Fediverse instances. It provides them a way to reach their customers without having to rely on another company acting as the middleman.

          Mastodon is really solid and with the Dutch government and the BBC running their own instance I imagine others will follow suite.

          Still not sure about a Reddit replacement though since both Lemmy and kBin have their problems.

          Spin up a PeerTube instance and companies have an effective means of setting up discussion forums for their products, a news feed for broadcasting updates, and a video hosting solution that can all be tied together through the Fediverse.

    • solarizde@feddit.deEnglish
      2·
      11 months ago

      I hope there will be a pro version where you can pay to opt out of all ad and track nonsense.

  • Stovetop@lemmy.mlEnglish
    372·
    11 months ago

    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.

    • scribs@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      232·
      11 months ago

      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.

    • gaydarless@lemmy.caEnglish
      12·
      11 months ago

      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.

      • FurbyOnSteroids@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        32·
        11 months ago

        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.

    • randint@lemm.eeEnglish
      121·
      11 months ago

      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.

        • Tangent5280@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          11 months ago

          I am so happy whenever I see people asking more about privacy practices. It makes me feel like the fight is not so hopeless after all.

          • Ghost@lemmy.mlEnglish
            1·
            11 months ago

            I feel the same way. As someone who studies and works in cyber security I love teaching people about how to stay safe or at least as safe as possible.

            Some people don’t go the degree I go to just to keep my stuff secure. I use hardened Arch kernels and I hardly even use arch my entire time I spend on a PC is through a VM. I have 2 computers one just for windows and gaming and then one for Linux and cyber security and coding stuff

            I hate dual booting and do not like windows being close to my Linux install so I keep them separate on two different computers 😂

            Other than doing 3D printing and rendering stuff all I do is study malware and writing my own programs.

        • ryannathans@lemmy.fmhy.netEnglish
          0·
          11 months ago

          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

      • randint@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        11 months ago

        It is their browser. The tracking protection is in their browser and tells Android that it’s a VPN.

    • ShakeThatYam@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      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 😅

  • awwwyissss@lemm.eeEnglish
    308·
    11 months ago

    I got to that exact screen and my excitement went from 100 to like 10. I’m back on Connect, didn’t even take Sync out for a spin.

    • Wet@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      11 months ago

      Same for me. Tried disabling personal data for all advertisers but you gotta go one by one, there’s no Reject all option and there are way too many… so back to Connect.

    • Tangent5280@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      11 months ago

      The exact same for me, and I had just made a new account to use with sync for lemmy - logged in via sync, then read the privacy policy, logged out, and closed the app. I was crushed because now I couldn’t even use the cool username I signed up with anywhere else either because now the admachines already knew it and probably already attached it to my device ID.

      • awwwyissss@lemm.eeEnglish
        53·
        11 months ago

        Yeah that’s the shitty thing about interacting with these corporate spying services, they’re very good at invading your privacy and making connections to break your anonymity.

      • Stumblinbear@pawb.socialEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        GA collects very limited information by default. You have to go pretty far out of your way to give Google usernames, posts, etc for ad purposes. It’s likely the only thing they received was a device identifier generated specifically for the new install of the app. You’re fine.

    • Powerpoint@lemmy.caEnglish
      51·
      11 months ago

      I was just pointed towards infinity for Lemmy. It’s pretty solid, open source, no ads

    • Wahots@pawb.socialEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      I’ve been using DDG for tracking, and Connect had all sorts of weird tracking when I used it. Check it out with some network monitor and make sure it’s not sending back your info.

      • awwwyissss@lemm.eeEnglish
        0·
        11 months ago

        Thanks for the info. Which ones are open source and don’t track? Liftoff and Jerboa?

        • Wahots@pawb.socialEnglish
          2·
          11 months ago

          Jerboa seems clean so far! Haven’t tried Liftoff much as I didn’t like the UI.

  • andysteakfries@lemmy.worldEnglish
    255·
    11 months ago

    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.

  • GlitchSir@lemmy.worldEnglish
    14·
    11 months ago

    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.

    • just_another_person@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      11 months ago

      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.

  • guriinii@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    11 months ago

    Use a duckduckgo tracker blocker. It’ll show you what trackers it has and what they typically collect.

    • Madbrad200@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      11 months ago

      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.

      • blackbarn@lemm.eeEnglish
        3·
        11 months ago

        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.

  • Skates@feddit.nlEnglish
    52·
    11 months ago

    I just installed it and I 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.

        • Tangent5280@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          11 months ago

          How does the app know you’re from Europe? GPS? Geolocation tagging? Can someone hypothetically pretend to be from Europe too?

          • Rikudou_Sage@lemmings.worldEnglish
            1·
            11 months ago

            Usually IP address. For other things it would have to have your permission (and if you give a Lemmy app permission for your location, well it’s on you). You could probably use an EU VPN. Though I’m not sure of their implementation, they might disregard your choices if you disconnect from VPN.

      • Skates@feddit.nlEnglish
        11·
        11 months ago

        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.

  • Holodeck_Moriarty@lemm.eeEnglish
    2·
    11 months ago

    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?

  • spez@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    11 months ago

    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.

  • stankmut@lemm.eeEnglish
    12·
    11 months ago

    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