In the GrapheneOS forum, I encountered a claim that F-droid is insecure (and not good at privacy as well). These links (and more) were given as an evidence:
- https://privsec.dev/posts/android/f-droid-security-issues/
- https://xcancel.com/GrapheneOS/status/1883895255142932816#m
- https://github.com/obfusk/fdroid-fakesigner-poc
While there are some attitude against FOSS app, I think the arguments are generally sound and in good-faith. Which makes me confused, as I’ve been hearing good words about F-droid in lemmyverse.
I am not good at assessing arguments, so I want to ask you guys for more aspects and information.
Also, if not F-droid, what should I use? Is Aurora store, a frontend of play store, not fine to use as well?
I use bank app for contactless payments. But the bank app have no other permissions, even location is fake.
The one good thing about banks is they make these little plastic rectangles with metal chips in them that you can insert into a device at the terminal in order to pay for your stuff. No bank app required.
At least in the United States, these little plastic rectangles have a series of 16 numbers on them, followed by a date and a year and a three digit code.
Those plastic rectangles doesn’t have any security against range extend attacks so they can steal money from you and you would be plain unaware and defenses. While phone or watch will only enable contactless payment on demand making it way safer. And you can pay with contactless payment everywhere in Poland while you sometimes can’t pay with inserting physical card on some automated devices as there is no where to insert that card, you can only use contactless feature of that card.
Not to mention those plastic rectangles cost yearly or sometimes even monthly, while app is 100% free. And if the app at any point in time do anything that I didn’t agree in the agreement and/or bypass any permissions I didn’t grant them there will be hell to pay for them.
But maybe I’m wrong, I don’t know…
If you think that app is not collecting your data, you are totally naive.
Like I already wrote, I fully know that it is collecting data, thats why I’m giving it some bogus ones (like for example fake location), and some other valid one (like for example my device id and IP when I use it) that I did agree to give in exchange for protecting my bank account from being hijacked and other.
Other than that it collects nothing more at least nothing active. Why do you ask? Because bank app have background internet access denied so it can only connect to internet when it is in foreground. Yes, it could run some periodical task in background, store that data on disk and send it only when active but that’s something that facebook would definitely do. While I agree that a lot of shitty apps do that, I doubt that bank will try to risk gdpr breach (that would hurt them monetairly in many ways) over some useless data that they could access.
On top od that I have have network traffic monitor always on screen so I see when something is using network and howuch, ans that it stays flat 0 when I use offline apps, that gives me confidence that nothing is actively sending data to network.
And yes, I already once closed my bank account because of a shitty app, so I know what I’m saying.