Right To Repair Advocate Louis Rossman recently announced the release of FUTO, a Text To Speech App that respects your privacy.
After having played around with FUTO on my GrapheneOS Pixel, I can honestly say it’s nice to have. Using the Openboards Keyboard, I’ll admit that the one thing I missed about Gboards was its text to speech capability, but I refused to use it because it logs everything said into it.
IMHO, the team that developed FUTO have created something truly special here, and I’d recommend anyone to at least try it out.
There is a one time $10 payment, but the developers have basically made this more like an opt in donation, as you can just click ‘I Already Paid’ and utilize the app regardless of whether you paid or not. If you try FUTO out, and like it, maybe throw them a few bucks.
Here is an invidious link of Rossman talking about FUTO and its features.
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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.
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Some folks on the !android@lemdro.id post about this the other day cautioned about a tracker present in the app.
Ok i would like to defend them here. It is not a standard tracker like what u would expect. It is a crash log that sends crash logs to a them only if you agree to it. I would arfue this is fair but use it how u see fit and dont send ur reports if u dont want to.
i wasn’t aware. Could you link the specific post? It’s not up on the feed from that community in jerboa…
EDIT: Found it. okay, yes, FUTO does have some telemetry issues. Glad I posted this as it needs this kind of scrutiny thank you!
On the flip side, I now have another Lemmy community I joined and the Exodus App that catches these sorts of trackers is pretty cool. I already had revoked FUTO’s network permissions on GrapheneOS, so hopefully that mitigates the telemetry problem.
I wish we had universal links to specific posts! Glad you were able to find it. Link for others: https://lemdro.id/post/2022094 - seems to be a few updates since my last visit.
On desktop anyways, the Instance Assistant extension ( !instance_assistant@lemmy.ca ) can let you jump between posts. I haven’t figured out a pattern on what the mobile apps are doing. Sometimes when I copy the link it’s from my home instance, sometimes it’s not.
ex. Here is the same post on a few different instances, generated by the extension:
It’s important to clarify here that this “tracker” is a service that allows the develops to upload their crash reports. Furthermore it only triggers when the app crashed and even then you have to actively allow it to be send.
Also wasn’t this open source? Couldn’t one of these holier than thou privacy people just create a branch without the service and side load it?
Also important, the same tracker exists in the official F-Droid client app. Could it really be that big if a concern if it exists there too?