Can we have some clarification on what "Usage Data" the app collects and shares with advertisers?

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.
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.
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
I also don't see any weird activity on my adguard logs after subscribing to Ultra.
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.
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.
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.
- 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
- 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.
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.
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..
- 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!
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.
- Just imagine: Microsoft creating a lemmy.xbox.com and creating centralized gaming communities like !halo@lemmy.xbox.com or !doom@lemmy.bethesda.com 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?
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

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.

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.
I was just pointed towards infinity for Lemmy. It's pretty solid, open source, no ads
- Where would one download that?
Same. I saw that line in the privacy policy, and immediately uninstalled
Same..
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.
- 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.
- You most likely can use the account, unless the author is intentionally doing something shady, Google doesn't know your username from this interaction.
- 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.
Same
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.
- Thanks for the info. Which ones are open source and don't track? Liftoff and Jerboa?

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.
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.
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.
- 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.

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.
- 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.

That's a good question

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.

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
Hey, it isn't paranoia if they really are out to get us, and we already know that they are.

They gonna take anything they can sell. Grow up.

I would never ever put this garbage in my app. No way I am going to use sync again.

I'm guessing the dev is cashing out and probably doesn't expect Lemmy to last.