WHAT?!
They are arguing with F-Droid devs…
Wow, the debate is intense and I understand that some people want to use the most irreproachable services possible. However, do we really have nothing better to do than to confuse and divide ourselves within the community?
Please understand the choices of those who are in the projects. THEY defend privacy for all, and are more familiar with the challenges OM face and the solutions to address them. It’s a bit easy to criticize a service to which you probably don’t contribute at all…
If OM needs funding, it has to find a business model. Even in the privacy community, we have to talk about money. The service can’t continually improve and serve hundreds of thousands of users while satisfying everyone, for free.
Will Organic Maps stop listening to its community?
Will Organic Maps become profit-driven? No.
More importantly, what’s your concrete problem?
What’s your threat model? You’re still not being tracked! the application hasn’t suddenly lost all its advantages!
Has Organic Maps abandoned the idea of not tracking users? NO
If it’s that bad, just don’t click the fucking link !
This advertising link will come in handy for tens of thousands of people, for developers and therefore for everyone who uses the application.
Yes, we all have to live together on the same app.
What’s more, we’ll now be able to opt-out of this feature.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
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This is entertaining not going to lie. 
We do not show ads, we show referral totally different hahaha. Crazy. I would love to see them argue this way against market authorities like FTC (not sure how that works in Murica).
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Ok. How Signal live without such privacy intrusive links? Signal live only by donations.
Devs should inform users why donations is important, not just adding ads while saying we have no ads.
We are unhappy because of their lack of respect to users, their lying and some rude comments and behaviourp
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That’s not really a fair comparison. Signal has gotten huge grants by f.x. WhatsApp in the past afaik. Also they have many people donating monthly (like nyself) to create a stable income.
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Devs should work on this too. Lack of working with such deals, lack of communication with users… That’s why they have such problems now
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Why would this be intrusive??
Kayak is surely intrusive if you go to its site, but tracking is not invading OM…
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I don’t know for sure, but I’d bet that its more complicated than just ‘make some deals’ and ‘ask people to donate more’. They already prominently display donation links and more people aren’t likely to donate (i.e. they have probably hit their current maximum donation revenue).
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This is a horrible example, see below for more context on why.
Definitely more difficult than just “making some deals”
And Signal is an especially misleading example to compare to.
Signal Aspires to be sustainable and funded through donations. But it is currently very far from sustainable and will run out of money if individual donations do not increase by massive amounts.
Why Signal is a poor choice of an organization to use for a comparison:
- Signal has unique advantages very few other non-profit or FOSS projects have access to. Signal received over 100 Million dollars from a single passionate Billionaire Boardmember (Brian Acton). The vast majority of non-profit, open source projects will never have a billionaire board member (or even a board).
- Even with all that startup capital, Signal is operating at a substantial loss and is not currently sustainable, Signal’s CEO Meredith Whittaker has a recent blogpost outlining the situation and the challenges and need for increased individual donations.
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They just banning and wiping all negative comments. Here is link
@no_username thats censorship.
To be fair, I don’t know that a referral link constitutes as “tracking” if all their database stores is that you were referred by Organic Maps. Whatever is in Kayak’s privacy policy has nothing to do with Organic Maps’ decision to link to them.
I just checked their repository, and they removed last three releases from F-Droid…
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Why has OM been removed from F-Droid?
It hasn’t. Organic Maps: Hike, Bike, Drive Offline | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository
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Yes, it does. Technically speaking referral link = ad.
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A referral link is not an “ad” - did you by chance mean a sponsored link? Because that is definitely an ad.
But me going into a restaurant and saying “my friend recommended this place” is not an advertisement. It’s a means of informing the business how I found out about them.
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Referal link, upon being clicked, generates money, which tops up the budget of advertiser, as well as the site owner’s one. Generally speaking: everything that generates money is an ad. Like it or not.
In some cases true. Nevertheless, I dont see reason to place it here; these are two different things IMO.
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Too bad. That was my favourite map provider. I hope someone will create a fork…
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Bro, stop lying to yourself, It’s exactly the same shit, just being put in a different manner
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