this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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You Should Know

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440
YSK: Lemmy browsing app Boost is tracking your data for profiling and more! Consider using other trackingless Lemmy apps such as Jerboa or Voyager (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 11 hours ago by orize@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/youshouldknow@lemmy.world
118 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

According to the tracking scanner Exodus (can be found on F-Droid), which keeps an updated database on trackers and runs your installed app against its register, you can track what apps are tracking you and clues of how. Saw that Boost is tracking me and uninstalled it and went straight to Jerboa. Jerboa is pretty similar to good ole' RedditIsFun-app and easy to use, so I am personally recommending it.

From F-Droid:

Exodus (Exodus show you trackers and permissions in apps installed on your device.) https://f-droid.org/packages/org.eu.exodus_privacy.exodusprivacy/

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[–] pineapplelover@lemm.ee 12 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Eternity still good

[–] RaoulDook@lemmy.world 3 points 55 minutes ago (1 children)

Yep it is. It's also free with no ads and open source.

[–] hiddenSin@lemmy.world 1 points 7 minutes ago

Problem is it had no updates in 6 months. I had problems with images and such. For now i am for Voyager app. Its updated regulary

[–] M137@lemmy.world 17 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

OP, you suck. This has been (falsely) reported before, and every time it gets shut down as fear-mongering. I really doubt you learned of this, did any kind of source checking or just looked it up without seeing the MANY disproving replies that are always there.

I've seen this enough times, this exact post, to where I'm certain it's consciously done false sensationalist crap. There are several other posts like this about other apps and services that get posted every couple of weeks/months and just like here they always get told off for their idiocy. I wouldn't be surprised if it's a group or person doing much of it, it's the exact same every time.

[–] MortUS@lemmy.world 9 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

What's the explanation? AWS sounds like ad trackage.

[–] burgersc12@mander.xyz -1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 40 minutes ago)

The tracking is still a thing, it's just transparent about selling your location and purchase history data to Amazon and the like... So that makes it OK I guess?

[–] grid11@lemy.nl 6 points 1 hour ago

On join-lemmy there is small warning for every closed source app

[–] Redditsux@lemmy.world 7 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Thanks. Just uninstalled it.

[–] stebo02@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

good now delete every other app on your phone that contains Google ads

[–] mugthol@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 points 1 hour ago (2 children)

But that's one less app and there are great alternatives, so why continue using one that tracks you?

[–] mbfalzar@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Because it doesn't?

[–] burgersc12@mander.xyz 8 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

It does. Check the official privacy policy, 9 mentions of trackers as well as the extremely limited options for opting out of the trackers.

[–] stebo02@lemmy.dbzer0.com -1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

I have bought the premium version because it was really cheap so no it doesn't track me

[–] Allero@lemmy.today 1 points 37 minutes ago

You do you, most goes with what's free and there are plenty of good free options available.

Ads are a bad way of funding the development, especially for Lemmy, a place where a lot of people are increasingly privacy-minded.

[–] ProxyZeus@lemmy.world 132 points 6 hours ago (6 children)

As the other comments are saying, this is made very clear when you launch the app for the first time that it is ad supported, and you can donate a small amount to get all tracking and ads removed.

Love the app and I want the dev to continue development so I paid for the ad free. Devs are people and need money to live too, you know this post was just sensationalized for your own clicks.

[–] krimson@lemmy.world 14 points 2 hours ago

I reported this post because it hurts the dev for no reason. Hope it gets removed but the damage is already done. People are stupid.

[–] kameecoding@lemmy.world 9 points 3 hours ago (4 children)

Lemmings have a huge obsession with shit being both free and adfree, youtube is the most baffling one, they refuse to pay for it, then bitch about the ads, it seems they are entitled to having VoD delivered to them anytime anywhere in the world got completely free.

[–] AngryMob@lemmy.one 10 points 2 hours ago

Youtube shouldn't be baffling to you if you pay attention. Youtube still hoards tons of data and tracking on top of its ads. And paying doesn't stop that. Also, they removed the option to pay to remove ads but skip all the other stuff. They removed that option right at the same time they started their war against ad blockers. Combine those points with the typical enshittification and we wind up with a service that doesn't deserve your pity.

[–] foenix@lemm.ee 12 points 2 hours ago

Counterpoint I think there's a lot of lemmings who put a lot of money into hosting the very server you just posted this comment on.

[–] samc@feddit.uk 7 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

For me at least, my objection with YouTube is that Google takes a cut. I'd much rather contribute an equivalent amount to some creators via patreon and adblock the site.

Also I'm not saying the host doesn't deserve a cut, I just think that corporations like Google are a general pest that should be eradicated

[–] Tja@programming.dev 2 points 40 minutes ago

Do have any idea how difficult it is to host a video platform? The cut they take is absolutely fair.

Anyone with a cell phone can be a youtuber.

I have close to 20 years of experience in IT and I would need to spend many days to set up an alternative for myself (forget about other people) even using software already made, and it would still cost a ridiculous amount of (partially upfront) money.

[–] count_duckula@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 2 hours ago

I'd pay for Youtube if Google would guarantee to not track me. I donate to open source projects that I use, rotating every month whom I choose to donate to. I even donated to Manjaro recently even though I don't use it any more, but it was something I had used in the past and I was poor and couldn't donate them then. But I refuse to feel any guilt for watching Youtube for free.

[–] mechoman444@lemmy.world 7 points 4 hours ago

Ya... I just bought the app. It was like 6 bucks? Totally worth it since I use it all the time and I want to support the dev.

[–] LaserTurboShark69@sh.itjust.works 18 points 6 hours ago

Same! Boost is awesome and it was a no brainer paying for the ad removal

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[–] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 115 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah there is a dialogue on first launch telling you it's ad supported software and that you can pay a small fee to remove all ads. Your post here is old news about an old strategy and throughout the comments here you claim it's secretive which is false.

It's a charitable reading to say you're uninformed. I would lean more toward you wanting people to be misinformed about Boost, because as others point out, its ad support is called out in multiple ways before you use it, but you don't care. Instead, you choose to call this completely common and standard way of supporting an app "predatory" and "secret", neither of which near truth. Op, is your account the alt of the Sync dev or something?

[–] jballs@sh.itjust.works 9 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (3 children)

Op, is your account the alt of the Sync dev or something?

I wish that was the case. @ljdawson@lemmy.world - the Sync dev - has been MIA for over half a year now. Which sucks, because Sync currently has a breaking bug causing it to not show posts as read, making it mostly unusable. I had to cancel my subscription for it that I was happily paying for before to support his work.

[–] CrayonRosary@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

You were happily paying it before then? He's done this so many times. I gave up about a year ago when he made markdown work in titles, which no one asked for, and then disappeared again. Everyone who started a title with a hashtag had a giant freaking font for a heading. And spoiler markdown had never worked right. It always used the reddit style. It would even change proper Lemmy spoiler tags into reddit ones when you editted your comment.

I took the time to try out every other app at the time and settled on Thunder. It's just as good, it's in active development, and it's free and open source, so it can never be abandoned like Sync is. Anyone can fork it if they had to, and keep it going.

It pisses me off so much that Lawson had the audacity to charge $20 for a broken port of Sync for Reddit and then disappear with severe open bugs for months at a time. I wish I could get my money back.

[–] jballs@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 hours ago

I downloaded Sync the first day he released it. It had a few bugs, but he was very active at the time and seemed to clean them up quickly. I made a post in his community about a problem with comment sorting and he resolved it the very next day!

So yeah, I glady paid for what I thought was a pretty good app (still is without the unread issue). Since then I've gone back to Voyager, which is ok but still has some quirks that make me miss Sync. Might give Thunder a shot.

[–] Nelots@lemm.ee 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

It does? I've never had this issue on Sync.

[–] jballs@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 hours ago

It happens when your home instance upgrades to a newer version of Lemmy that changed how one of the variables worked to track read posts. I'm guessing lemme.ee hasn't upgraded yet? Sh.itjust.works upgraded something like 6 months ago and it's been unusable ever since. I suppose I could make an account on another instance, but that's a pain.

[–] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 4 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

wow... subscription and also MIA that long!

[–] jballs@sh.itjust.works 4 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

It was pretty common for him to disappear for a while and then pop up with a whole bunch of new features. I didn't mind that before and gladly paid the $1.50/month subscription to support his work and make Lemmy more accessible. But yeah, can't justify it now that the app shows all links as unread.

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[–] lemmyausmister@feddit.org 6 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

What about connect?

[–] snail_stampede@midwest.social 5 points 3 hours ago

The duck duck go app tracker firewall thing their browser comes with stops trackers coming from Connect. It's a bummer cuz I like the app but I've been using a web browser more and more to access lemmy.

[–] Cataphract@lemmy.ml 19 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

I guess I'm just legitimately confused about how to feel about it all. Lemmy is free, signing up on an instance is free, people are posting/creating content for free, moderators are taking care of the space for free. No one's locking in to get "fed" through the entire chain. The arguments about abandoned apps doesn't really compute since plenty paid and advertising friendly apps go under/stop developing further as well (and the entire Lemmy eco-system is free so silly points of "capitalism better"). There's also the crux of "Apps just replace a webpage", they're really not reinventing the wheel here.

But, if people prefer paid apps, if the developers want to construct the apps in that manner, have at it. I do think spreading awareness of what apps are out there is important, and how they operate (this is YSK after all). I also wouldn't spend time in my day coming into defend organizations that want to monetize on open source community projects either.

[–] Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee 2 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

Nothing is immune to enshitification, not even non-shitified things.

To enshitify in human (it seems).

To grow past & beyond it is to stride for greatness, for the way forward for society to evolve.

Support foss you would like to see in the future, evolving into next gens.

And no, I do not mean support with ads of the evil megacorps!! I mean support by directly sending devs coffee or whatever the nice donation button says.

[–] Rogue@feddit.uk 17 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

I guess I'm just legitimately confused about how to feel about it all.

The freedom of Lemmy and the fediverse let's people choose how to interact with it.

If a user is looking for a free to use , open source, ad-free experience then that's their choice.

If others are happy to pay for an app because they prefer the experience that app provides them they can choose to do so.

I also wouldn't spend time in my day coming into defend organizations that want to monetize on open source community projects either.

OP read that Boost may contain code used for tracking, then started spewing some conspiracy that "Boost is tracking your data for profiling and more!" without any proof or any actual research.

This isn't a case of defending some giant corporation, it's just stopping tedious drama before it spreads.

If you check OPs profile they've been spreading this for over a week. When I first saw this thread the masses were heavily upvoting the conspiracy and downvoting anyone disagreeing.

[–] IAmVeraGoodAtThis@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 hours ago

OP read that Boost may contain code used for tracking, then started spewing some conspiracy that "Boost is tracking your data for profiling and more!" without any proof or any actual research.

This has actually been on my mind for a while now. Louis Rossmann and his consequences have been a disaster for the human race. He and his ilk talk about profiling in terms so sensationalist ("data stealing", "spying") that any connection to reality goes out the window and people become conspiratorial and paranoid. All reasoning about why it happens gets flattened to "they're evil" and there's no way to actually engage with the reasons.

[–] Rogue@feddit.uk 231 points 9 hours ago (13 children)

This is a rather sensationalist headline.

Every so often software developers need to eat food and live beneath shelter.

The developer of Boost @rmayayo@lemmy.world provides a free version that's supported by ads, or you can purchase an ad free experience for a one time cost. That's been a standard business since forever.

There isn't any grand conspiracy here.

[–] otter@lemmy.ca 120 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

Yup, the dev commented on this a while back here:

https://lemmy.ca/post/6072534/3382664

Dev here.

The dialog and its content is not created by me, it is a standard solution from Google to comply with GDPR and other laws. More info here: https://support.google.com/admob/answer/10114014?hl=en

The consent dialog is also required by Google AdMob to show ads, and it is shown when the ad network is initialized.

When the app launches, first it checks for the remove ads purchase, and if it is not present, it will initialize the ads sdk. The ad network is not initialized if the remove ads purchase is detected.

Boost for Reddit was using the very same ad networks and consent dialog.

(In fact they've commented on this a few times)

I personally liked Boost, and paid for the ad free version to support the development. For what it's worth, I've also donated to / bought a few others for similar reasons, and I keep a few Lemmy apps installed so I can test things out on the admin side.

Without recommending any particular app, I'd recommend this site, which lets you compare and filter by the factors that are important to you: https://lemmyapps.com/

If you want a guide for new users, we have one here (tldr it links to the site above): https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/lemmy/for-users/mobile-apps

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