[tor-talk] trackers in OONI Probe Mobile App / was: NEW RiseupVPN test in OONI Probe Mobile App

[Maria Xynou]

Dear Christian,

Thanks for your email.

We are using the open source tool Countly in a *self-hosted* way
specifically because we care about user privacy.

This means that the UK company you speak of does *not* collect OONI
Probe users' data.

Importantly: You can opt-out of Countly and Firebase data collection by
disabling this in the Settings of your OONI Probe app.

We need to use Countly in order to:

1. Send push notifications (for users who have opted-in to this)  =>
This is important to coordinate testing during emergent censorship events

2. Submit crash reports => This is important to fix the app

We recently enabled Firebase because we were investigating several app
crashes that were not being displayed properly by Countly.

We are not sure if we are going to keep Firebase in the long-run, but
it's difficult to investigate app crashes without proper reports.

Do you have any suggestions for better tools to collect app crashes on
Android?

You can learn more about OONI data practices through our Data Policy:
https://ooni.org/about/data-policy

Cheers,

Maria.

On 05/02/21 18:45, Christian Pietsch wrote:
> Dear Maria,
> dear OONI Probe users,
>
> having used OONI Probe on Android devices in the past, I was shocked
> to find out today that at least the version distributed via Google's
> Play Store seems to contain two trackers, namely Countly and Google
> Firebase Analytics: https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/161999/
>
> Countly is UK based. They admit that they collect personal data from
> users as defined in the GDPR: https://count.ly/legal/privacy-policy
> Regarding Google (Firebase) Analytics, we know they collect any data
> they can. Trackers are spyware. Don't use apps that contain them!
>
> F-Droid provides a version of OONI Probe to Android users that is
> tracker-free – like all apps in this app store. I double-checked it
> using the Exodus software mentioned above on the command line.
> https://f-droid.org/de/packages/org.openobservatory.ooniprobe/
>
> Why don't you provide a clean version of your app to the majority of
> Android users who still rely on Google's Play Store, OONI?
>
> Cheers,
> Christian
>
>
> On Thu, Jan 28, 2021 at 11:21:13AM +0100, Maria Xynou wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> We're excited to share that the latest OONI Probe version features a
>> brand new test for RiseupVPN!
>>
>> You can now check whether RiseupVPN works on your network. Learn all
>> about this test here: https://ooni.org/nettest/riseupvpn/
>>
>> To run the new RiseupVPN test, update to the latest version (2.9.1) of
>> OONI Probe Mobile: https://ooni.org/install/mobile
>>
>> All RiseupVPN test results from around the world are openly published in
>> near real-time:
>> https://explorer.ooni.org/search?since=2020-12-30&test_name=riseupvpn
>>
>> Warm thanks to the folks from the LEAP collective for developing this
>> new test! <3
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Maria (on behalf of the OONI team).


-- 
Maria Xynou
Research & Partnerships Director
Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI)
https://ooni.org/
PGP Key Fingerprint: 2DC8 AFB6 CA11 B552 1081 FBDE 2131 B3BE 70CA 417E