this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2026
79 points (97.6% liked)
Open Source
49447 readers
333 users here now
All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!
Useful Links
- Open Source Initiative
- Free Software Foundation
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Software Freedom Conservancy
- It's FOSS
- Android FOSS Apps Megathread
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
- !libre_culture@lemmy.ml
- !libre_software@lemmy.ml
- !libre_hardware@lemmy.ml
- !linux@lemmy.ml
- !technology@lemmy.ml
Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.
founded 7 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
IMO "tracker detection" while well intentioned has the potential to backfire, because it can give the appearance of an endorsement of "good" proprietary apps if they don't have any "trackers" or "dangerous permissions"
The goal of the free software movement for the last ~40 years has been to switch from proprietary to free in order to gain the four freedoms. Trackers and permissions are orthogonal to all that
I think showing tracker info is still a good, insightful thing. Sure, giving an impression one piece of software is better than another because it has less trackers is a bad thing. Users that care about functionality will vet apps on that regard, same with security and privacy conscious users. Some users just like the app to be pretty, and if they ignore everything else but make a decision based in tracker count, all the better in the long run.