Gnome Online Accounts (GOA) - privacy issues?
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Hello everybody,
To people like Stallman, freedom is not only free software but software that respect or ensure your privacy. I think he rightly called Ubuntu Amazon stuff (is it "scope"?) spyware.
I watched a presentation by the main dev of GOA but he didn't address the question of privacy. So I would like to know what your thoughts are on this piece of software which seems to cater mainly for people's urgency to rush and join FB and GMail at lightning speed as if their lives depended on these services. I don't really see the point of such software but if it's harmless, so be it.
BTW, Mono applications seem to have quietly left GNOME in the recent years, free software yet under the thumb of M$ which I think Stallman was right to guard developers against. LinuxMint LMDE has a lot of Mono stuff and libraries but GNOME on Debian seems to be free from them, according to what Synaptic shows.
Cheers :-)
I never found GOA useful.
Endorsement of Google should have no place in GNOME, and I'm surprised
that there was no uproar about the inclusion of support and suggestion
for such accounts in a default component of what is supposed to be a
GNU-endorsed desktop environment. Forget GOA privacy issues- the
accounts it suggests themselves disrespect their useds' freedom and
privacy. I wouldn't touch GOA with a ten-foot pole.
Quite, and I wouldn't either.
Yet perhaps most GNU/Linux users unfortunately use GMail at least, and probably other Google services. So GNOME caters for the majority of users. Those who think it's bad are a handful.
Even when I didn't care/know about free software and privacy, I didn't find GOA very useful either...
I honestly don't even know what it does.
GNOME Online Accounts is a default application included in GNOME which
users can set up a number of supported accounts with to integrate them
with other GNOME programs. The practical benefits of this I'm not sure
of, and when I used Debian with GNOME I never used it. My problem with
it is that it provides a framework that effectively endorses the use of
Facebook, Google, and a number of other pernicious services. Google, for
instance, appears as one of -suggested- services for connection. I'm
surprised that this got by in a desktop environment endorsed by GNU.
As I understand it, GOA connects you directly to various accounts, whether it's FB or Jabber.
From Gnome Wiki: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeOnlineAccounts
> GOA provides a centralized service that allows a set of online accounts to be configured for use with core GNOME applications. In UX terms, GOA provides a static list of online accounts that can be setup by users (through the Online Accounts panel in System Settings). These accounts can then be used by core GNOME applications.
> While third party applications can access the accounts setup through GOA, this is not its explicit goal, nor does GOA set out to enable third party applications to add online accounts of their own. There are several reasons for this:
Third-party applications should be able to identify themselves to online services for the purposes of branding and tracking.
Third-party applications shouldn't be able to identify themselves under a generic OS or distributor key - this would be misleading as to what is actually accessing the account, and would prevent there from being specific contracts of trust between users and applications who access their data.
It would prevent users from blocking specific applications from accessing their account (should an application sandboxing framework come into effect).
===
From https://developer.gnome.org/goa/stable/
> Providers
GoaExchangeProvider — A provider for Microsoft Exchange servers
GoaGoogleProvider — A provider for Google
GoaMediaServerProvider — A provider for Media Server
GoaWindowsLiveProvider — A provider for Windows Live accounts
GoaFacebookProvider — A provider for Facebook
GoaFlickrProvider — A provider for Flickr
GoaFoursquareProvider — A provider for Foursquare
GoaTelepathyProvider — A provider for Telepathy
=====
gnome-online-accounts is present in Trisquel Packages, and perhaps included in the GNOME edition of Trisquel as it's free software.
Perhaps if you don't use GOA, it doesn't do anything and so is harmless. I have no idea.
"BTW, Mono applications seem to have quietly left GNOME in the recent years, free software yet under the thumb of M$ which I think Stallman was right to guard developers against. LinuxMint LMDE has a lot of Mono stuff and libraries but GNOME on Debian seems to be free from them, according to what Synaptic shows.
Banshee, Docky (unless you're talking preinstalled packages).
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