Hans-Christoph Steiner @eighthave@librem.one

As lead maintainer of the official #FDroid client, I hear a lot of criticism that #targetSdkVersion is still at 25. fdroidclient is #FreeSoftware, publicly audited, with #ReproducibleBuilds, written in memory safe languages, with a proven record of respecting #privacy and delivering #security. The source and binaries also receive human and machine review. #targetSdkVersion is designed around untrusted proprietary software with non-memory safe code where the binary only gets machine review. 1/2

I find it super frustrating how well constructed #Google #privacy PR is. They are masters of taking one little problem, making an a solid privacy improvement to it, then using it to distract people from their giant surveillance capitalism machine. Something like that is only a privacy improvement for people who are fully in Google's ecosystem. Switching to using Google Fi encrypted calling would be a net privacy loss.

There are two semi-related questions that have been repeatedly popping up in my head for the past couple years: 1) now that we know how to do real #SecureMessaging, are we sure we want a world where wiretapping isn't possible? 2) now that we know how to privately track usage without #tracking people, are we sure we want to encourage software development based on tracking data? #privacy

Reading about how #Vivaldi browser aims to remove unique IDs when counting users makes me think about how #fdroid hasn't been tracking users from the beginning, and stopped tracking downloads years ago, and seems to only have become more popular. Makes me think that #FreeSoftware developed by community motivated by doing the right thing is a better way than a #startup or being driven by #tracking. Maybe improving the #privacy of tracking is missing the point.
https://vivaldi.com/blog/how-we-count-our-users/

Don’t Let Encrypted Messaging Become a Hollow Promise
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/dont-let-encrypted-messaging-become-hollow-promise #privacy #e2e