patchwork

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Blacklight is basically a front-end for DuckDuckGo's open source tracker radar tool. https://github.com/duckduckgo/tracker-radar

In a world increasing dominated by surveillance capitalists and dystopian tech, conscientious consumerism is one of the most effective tools we still have to effect change. Google chooses to sell tech to a Far-Right government's engaged in ethnic cleansing, Bitwarden chooses Google as a business partner for analytics, marketing, cloud services, etc... I choose to not use Bitwarden.

Another resource to assist in choosing which services to use is the open project PrivacySpy. Bitwarden doesn't score very well by their metrics either.

https://privacyspy.org/product/bitwarden/

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

Initially Bitwarden was one of the most impressive FOSS password managers, but their increasing willingness to trade user privacy for services and promotion by our favorite surveillance capitalist's is the real issue imho. Believing Privacy and Security are inextricably linked, I cannot recommend, nor use them at this time.

A quick scan on Blacklight (TheMarkup's Privacy Tool) is an eye opener.

https://themarkup.org/blacklight?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbitwarden.com%2F&device=mobile&location=us-ca&force=false

[–] [email protected] 23 points 3 months ago

Fairphone 4 with eOS, escaping Google and Apple's duopoly is quite liberating and not as hard as I thought it would be. Yeah, eOS is technically Android, but deGoogled.

https://e.foundation/

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Stripe is one of the largest payment providers on the Internet, they recommend hCaptcha, not Alphabet's reCAPTCHA in their docs, so it's obviously a choice. Please don't proclaim to be "Extremely concerned" with customer privacy and choose a service provided by a data harvesting advertising company to save money when a privacy preserving option is available.

https://stripe.com/docs/disputes/prevention/card-testing

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Michael, thank you for responding, but Google's reCAPTCHA isn't only required for payment on your site, it's required just to send a message for customer service or to contact sales as I have done both recently. There are plenty of payment provider's that to not mandate Google services. Personally I enjoy a lot of Google services when I choose to use them, but being mandated to use Google, as my child is forced to do attending school makes me wonder we companies like System 76 perpetuate this trend of the government and private industry forcing people to use services instead of letting consumers make the choice themselves in the so-called "free market."

 

Please don't flame me too bad, I understand that although privacy and libre software are important to many in the Linux community, my opinions may be outside the scope of consideration for some and I respect that.

Personally, conscientious consumerism and privacy are some of the primary reasons I use Linux. I prefer community>private business>corporate when I am choosing products and services.

-System76

About 8 years ago I purchased a laptop from System76, the customer service was incredible and the machine exceeded my expectations in build quality and performance.

Recently I've been in the market for a smaller machine, like a Thinkpad X1, StarBook 14 or System76 Lemur.

Last week, when I visited the System76 website they used Plausible's open source analytics on the home page (which is a great alternative to Google's proprietary hardware fingerprinting algorithm), but once I added the laptop to my cart to checkout, I noticed the third-party trackers, apis.google and ajax.googleapis load on the webpage. Google's reCAPTCHA was also required to complete the purchase. Hell, even Discord has switched to hCaptcha at this point citing their laughable "Gamer Privacy First" policy.

IMHO, I find it hypocritical that System76 does so much great work disabling Intel's IME and contributing to coreboot, but chooses to embed proprietary tracking software on their website when open source alternatives are readily available.

  • Reaching out to System 76

After completing 14 reCAPTCHA's I was finally able to get a dialogue with Stetson at System 76. He said that "System 76 takes user data privacy and security extremely seriously, but they would continue to use Google services." His recommended solution was placing the order over the phone if I wasn't comfortable having third-party tracking during checkout.

This is not a solution for me because I don't want to do business with a company that monetizes user data for profit. In my experience, companies that monetize data (Alphabet, Meta, etc..) offer web services cheaper than competitors that don't, in exchange for access to user data. So, if you're getting a commercial service cheaper from a company that sells your user's data, you're also profiting from the sale by paying a lower premium for those services.

Personally, I do not think you're taking user privacy "extremely" seriously if you're running third party trackers and choosing reCAPTCHA (not a privacy respecting service) over hCaptcha on your website.

I really like System 76 and I want to support them with my next purchase, but presently I feel like they are saying one thing and doing another and choosing privacy respecting libre software some of the time when it suits their marketing, but proprietary anti-consumer tracking services when it's more profitable.