Tracking/Reporting Activity

[swindlesmccoop]

On F-Droid, it says This app tracks and reports your activity. What is the extent of the tracking, and can you disable it?

[licaon-kter]

It connects to rpc.biglybt.com and version.biglybt.com at least on start

Torrent search is just Google.

[swindlesmccoop]

Well according to the former, it collects:

* installer version, client version, os, ip address, and country.

As well as information on

* Install start and complete.  So we can detect if there's install problems.
* Which plugins you choose to install.  So we know which plugins to continue to work on.
* Which VPN you are using, if we can detect one.  So we know which VPNs to test out to see if BiglyBT works well with them.
* Whether you migrated, or used BiglyBT before.
* Where you got the installer from (ie. www.biglybt.com, or github)

[TuxPaper]

See https://www.biglybt.com/privacy-android.php for a more detailed list of what is sent for the Android app.

Android client doesn't use google for searching, however, it still uses www.google.com to determine which network interface had a real connection to the internet.

[TuxPaper]

I will put in an option to disable rpc.biglybt.com access (the app start logger) in the next version. That seems pretty trivial.

The version.biglybt.com might be a bit harder, since that's how we get the user's public IP address. I'm not sure what the ramifications of not getting your public ip is, so we'd have to spend some time looking at what impact it has. fwiw, we have several backup public ip checkers in core (ipify and dyndns). Perhaps providing an ui with a list of them and a custom url option would suffice.

likewise, the www.google.com access can also be added as config url option somewhere

[swindlesmccoop]

that's how we get the user's public IP address

Surely you can do that through the system API or something?

[parg]

Which system API? (Windows, OSX and Linux of course)

[licaon-kter]

Topic as Android so Android, but that might yield simply "local Wi-Fi RFC1918 IPv4" or if lucky real IPv6, but but but that might be routed by the ISP or not etc

[not-programmer98]

Could you make a a Floss flavor of the app?