Have started to switch away from some services to open-source alternatives. But for some there aren’t almost any alternatives.
When trying to find alternatives to Life360 and Cronometer, I stumbled upon Paralino and OpenNutriTracker. However, these aren’t very talked about and I don’t know anything about coding to verify anything.
So my question is, how trustworthy/secure is it to switch to services like these that seem relatively obscured?
For someone with no coding experience who wishes to verify the “trustworthiness” of an app or program they are switching to, I often recommend the following steps:
- Determine the age of the project. Did this just pop up a month ago, or is this a long lasting project?
- Find and read the privacy policy to determine what kinds of data are collected about the user.
- Find user discussions (as you said this can be difficult for lesser known applications)
With respect to the specific applications you mentioned (away from Life360, Cronometer and to Paralino, OpenNutriTracker) I would recommend you check out This past discussion on a similar topic. I took a brief look at OpenNutriTracker, and it mostly struck me as new/not stable yet. However their stated features lined up well in comparison to Waistline just with an app available for iOS as well.
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Pretty much anything is better than Life360.
Paralino doesn’t seem to be open source in the quick seconds I looked at it. Maybe have a look Zood Location?
OpenNutriTracker seems popular enough to not worry all too much.
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For “suspicious” open source software, there is always Virustotal that you can submit a sample for.