Good catch. Still, doesn’t make it true either: it’s not such a “fundamental use case” that it would even require the capability. The browser already reports the usable information in the user agent (you rarely even in that 1% need more specificity than “Windows” on “Desktop Intel”).

No. It should be made available with a permission, because not every site out there is going to offer you to download binaries. 1% of the web “”“requiring”“” this does not justify 99% of the web being able to violate that privacy.

Operating system and CPU architecture are useful for sites to serve the correct binaries when a user is downloading an application.

Barely. You could trim down the data to incredibly low granularity (“OS: Windows”, “CPU: Intel Desktop”) and you’d still get the exact same binary as 99% of the people 99% of the time, anyway.

No need to report any sort of even remotely precise value then. Just report “low” or “high”. Also it’s bold of you to assume that just because I am plugged to the wall I want to be served 400 MB of exta javascript and MPEG4 instead of one CSS file and a simple PNG.

One of the biggest reasons websites need to run JS is submitting form data to a server. Like this website.

No. Forms function quite perfectly without JS thanks to action=.

Now whether you want to get “desktop app” fancy with forms and pretend you are a “first-class desktop citizen” that’s a skill issue. But submitting form data, by itself, has not required JS since at least 1979. Maybe earlier.

They can stop telegraphing some of this information, but then the websites won’t render properly (they use this information to display the website properly),

Pretty much none of the information is necessary to ever render a site properly.

OS and CPU architecture? Ireelevant to whether you are sending a JPG or PNG background. Nearly irrelevant to whether you are using a vertical or horizontal screen (and browsers adverstise that info separately anyway, it’s even part of CSS media queries).

Accelerometer and gyroscope? The only reason that could ever be needed for rendering is if the user is moving so incredibly fast that red pixels in their screen would become green due to shifting. And in any time between 2025 and 2999, if you have someone moving that fast, you have worse problems than the site not rendering adequately.

Keyboard layout? If the rendering of a site depends on whether I’m pulsing “g” vs “j” while it loads, then that’s quite stupid anyway because that boldly assumes the app focus is on the page.

Proximity sensor? Again: absolutely useless unless rendering environment moving at incredibly superhigh speed (at which the sensor might be reading data wrong anyway).

this means supporting an ad-driven business model

Not really, or rather it’s not me doing it. Free tier does not really incentivize data collection, nowadays even the business where you are paying still collect and sell information about you and you can’t trust they are not doing so (or turn heel behind your back) without high level access to their infrastructure.

I use free tier services; that signals that if you want to get my money, you have to do lots more than simply have a mouth to run. Some of those services have managed to prove their worth to my satisfaction, and deserved my payment, such as SDF which is where I have an account on, but even then I avoid subs and prefer one-time payments instead. But they are a minority (trust is not to be handed over freely) and Proton just squandered any chance of ever making the list.

Lol hate to say thank you

One thing that this entire situation has done for me is to make me feel more justified in my posture of never paying a subscription for an online service if I can avoid it. So far I’m using Proton stuff for the free tier only, so I can have some degree of relaxation in evaluating any alternatives withotu also having to worry about banking stuff.

“Is this Message approved by your board, and owners”

Didn’t the board already post in full support of this fucker, then try to delete the post for PR damage control?

Any good alternative to proton services? For mail I have tuta so far, but they cover only that part and the webmail UX in tuta is actually worse for the free tier.

And they specifically logged and delivered data about freedom fighters and environmentalists, so there’s some bias on Proton’s hand there.

Oh great now we’ll have DRM in Mesa. Linux is turning into Windows! /s

Apparently at least the downvoters on that post, yes.

I got here wondering wth was going on, it’d be weird to hear somehow that Gimp is anti-privacy, so, well, fortunately it’s not about that.

(also,

worrying about privacy

on Windows

)

Now, IIRC, Krita does have a Windows version.

so, basically, “paid”.

I hear this all the time, but to be fair it wasn’t even them. It was Google putting up “framework defenses” (with RCS, and now they’re doing the same with the native Android phone dialer).

Where Signal dropped the ball was their marketing: it was as easy as picking up their old app (TextSecure) so that they didn’t have to worry about feature clash with current Signal, then rebrand this old app as “Signal SMS” and boom, instant adoption because it’d be fairly trivial to “migrate”. And they get to steal the thunder from the apps that slowed down development.

From what I get, if your phone is anything other than a Pixel still within supported lifetime, then LOS is decent. At that point it’s mostly a hardware tradeoff (use a phone that all of has active lifetime support, is bootloader-relockable and has Custom ROM support) than a software one.