this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
1314 points (97.1% liked)
Privacy
32442 readers
640 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The reason F-Droid builds from source is to ensure that they can enforce their inclusion criteria. If you go outside F-Droid you lose that guarantee. For example, self-published apks in github or google play may contain anti-features or proprietary code that are forbidden by the F-Droid standards.
From another point of view, what you call a single point of failure is a third party that represents the interests of the user community, independent from individual developers. This is the same model used in GNU/Linux distributions, and Drew DeVault explains here the role that software distributions play in the free software community.
Of course, this represents a trade-off, in that you are placing trust in the software distribution instead of or in addition to the upstream developer. The question is, how can you solve the problem without foregoing F-Droid's inclusion standards? The answer is reproducible builds, where F-Droid builds from source and compares to the developer's apk, and publishes the developer's apk with their signature if the build reproduces successfully.
Until Reproducible builds are the norm in the Android free software world, I accept the trade-off because I value having software freedom in my computing, and I know I can't trust upstream developers to care about that as much as F-Droid or I do.
Sure, atleast you admit there's a trade off (security) for (FOSS) and maybe some additional privacy.
People should be made aware of the risks and choose according to their threat models, which is why I've highlighted some of these issues to begin with.