Community support needed: We want to use our users personal data
What comes to your mind, when you ask yourself why people use LibreOffice? A “stunning user experience” is likely not in the top list. And unfortunately we share this problem with a lot of user facing Free Software.
And there is a common reason: We value the privacy of our users.
Photo by Erik Mclean at Pexels
While our proprietary competitors constantly (mis)use user data to improve the UX of their products, we are maneuvering in thick fog. And whenever we try to reach out to our users to decide about design directions, we mainly get feedback from white, male nerds [1]. You hopefully see the problems this implies.
The only solution is: We need to be able to evaluate usage information from everyone else too. While preserving the privacy of our users of course.
We need to be totally clear here, as we are touching common ground of Free Software Communities. Data protection and control over own data is a major driver for a large fraction of our community [2]. And it is for us too. Only when it comes to avoiding data in the first place, we do have to state, that we need aggregated personal data to able to do our work. We do not think creating data is bad per se.
Is there a third way?
The current data economy is set up to send out personal data to the algorithms. Unfortunately data can easily be copied, and once it leaves your property, you lose all control over it. So, today, you either surrender and give up on your personal data or have to avoid producing data in the first place, which is hard work.
But how about a third way, where all personal data is stored locally on users’ devices and only the algorithms are sent to the data to learn? Then we only have to assure that the algorithm is not harming the privacy in anyway, that the results from those algorithms cannot be de-anonymized anymore and we can use the aggregated data of our users without compromising the integrity of a single user’s privacy.
The good news: We believe that we have found a partner project, polypoly.coop that creates exactly the infrastructure for this third way.
With this post we ask you, the community for your help and support for collaboration. We need you as a critical partner to watch out all we do aligns with our values. We, the UX team need the results of this collaboration to understand and reflect the needs of our diverse community. And we need your technical excellence to make sure we keep the basic promise: Any single user’s privacy is preserved.
You can find a lot of information about polypoly on their website. We still want to highlight a few aspects that make us think polypoly is the right project to partner with:
- polypoly is legally organized as a cooperative. Only individuals can become members. Each member has one vote, no matter how many shares are owned. This assures that polypoly will always work for and in the interest of the users and can never be bought by big money.
- polypoly is Free Software, following a dual licencing model that allows the commercial world to use the infrastructure in proprietary products. You can find the source code here: https://github.com/polypoly-eu/polyPod
- the dual licencing model is part of a business model and allows the cooperative to generate income, which makes it likely that the project is there to stay.
- polypoly is actively interested in cooperating with us and is willing to invest into this project
Benefits for LibreOffice
From time to time we run surveys about existing features or planned enhancements but without direct contact we have to invite users via social media. With the effect that questions typically are completed by tech-affine people with some expertise.
As a consequence we base decisions like what kind of UI should be the default [3] on anecdotal reports and input from individuals who are more vocal than other. Another example: A question we will never be able to understand right now, is what function comes most often before Undo, from which we could learn where uncertainties exists.
How it works
The basic idea of polypoly is pretty simple:
- User data is stored in a mesh network of user owned devices, which is called the polyPod. Each person stores their own data on their own device only, and it is only accessible with their explicit consent. So we want to log the personal data of our users in there, e.g. interactions with LibreOffice or demographic data from e.g. questionnaires. Very different kinds of data can be stored in the polyPod and all data stored is fully transparent and can be modified by the user.
- The users can define via so-called “features” who is allowed to work with their data, so The Document Foundation needs to ask the users for permission. Again, the user can fully control who is allowed to work on which data.
- Finally we can send out algorithms that learn from all the users that allow us to. So if we are interested how often different LibreOffice applications are being used related to the location of the user, we have to create an algorithm that learns the answer from user’s data and hops from user to user until we have the aggregated answer and the algorithm comes back to us.
The details are of course more complex and look well thought through. You will find more information on the polypoly website.
Next steps
In a first step we want to create a prove of concept that allows us to store relatively uncritical personal data from LibreOffice in the polyPod and run evaluations upon this. The actual data set has not been defined yet. Everything needs to be opt-in and must not compromise the normal operation of LibreOffice.
We want to increase the amount of generated data and users participating gradually until we are able to actually do UX work based on representative user feedback.
But most important is the backing of our community. We know how important privacy for our community is and we want you to help us and polypoly to do things right. We are convinced that this third way of dealing with personal data is the only possibility for Free Software to be successful also on the UX side. Because you cannot do proper UX work without proper contact to the users.
We are asking you to back this collaboration. If you have questions, please go ahead. Not only now, but always. Please, be a critical partner and help us to do things right and succeed in the end.
Written by Bjoern Balazs
Your email contained a well-reasoned statement of the problem and proposed solution.
I believe you have the right idea, and support you in this endeavor.
After reading subsequent posts from others on this topic, I realized I may not have fully understood the ramifications. I therefore withdraw my earlier comment and will withhold judgment for now.
Fellow LO users, please note that the author is a promoter (perhaps an investor?) in polypoly: A commercial enterprise planning to make money by selling access to data obtained of spying on people; it invites Europeans to invest in it, with the intent to recoup that investments by sale of personal data it will get its hands on, or some other monetization of personal data. See: https://polypoly-citizens.eu/en/becomepart .
Now, for the body of the post.
> Why people use LibreOffice? A “stunning user experience” is likely not in the top list
If we consider FOSS alternatives, people choose LO because of its feature set and its user experience. I haven’t taken a statistical survey, but that’s my impression, and I challenge the author to show otherwise.
If we think about commercial alternatives – people choose LO because it’s free – as in beer and as in speech; but also, because they can _trust_ LibreOffice: Trust us to have their best interests at heart, to be respectful and mindful of their rights and interests, and not send their data to the US government, or spy on them for some commercial interests or another. We should definitely not break that trust.
(And by the way: LibreOffice beats MS Office w.r.t. many aspects of User Experience)
Now, the UX deficiences we have in LO mostly do not require any automatic collection of user data. Such deficiencies are typically staring us right in the face and it’s merely a matter of recognizing them. In fact, most of them have probably already been reported.
> And there is a common reason: We value the privacy of our users.
The main reason our UX is not even better than it is now is lack of developer/UX/UI designer time to invest in improving it. A second reason is a lack of volunteers to perform comparisons and propose ideas for changes and redesigns. User privacy is not the main reason for UX trouble in LibreOffice, that’s a nonsensical statement.
So, essentially, polypoly are blowing up the extent of the usefulness of monitoring users.
> we mainly get feedback from white, male nerds
It’s interesting that Mr. Balazs, the author, wants feedback from non-“white” people. However, when it comes to investment and making money, polypoly only takes investments from Europeans, who are for the most part “white”.
There is definitely a lot that should be done to promote the use and improve the experience of using LibreOffice by people in non-white-majority countries. (I gave a LibOCon 2022 talk about supporting language communities for example.) Spying on them and collecting their data is not the way to go about it.
> Our competitors … use… the users’ data to improve the UX of their products
Which FOSS office suite spies on its users as they work with their office apps? Or is this just rhetoric?
> The only solution is: We need to be able to evaluate usage information from everyone … too.
That’s not a solution to anything, and we definitely don’t “need to evaluate” everyone’s usage information.
> The current data economy is set up to send out personal data to the algorithms.
Most FOSS apps are not set up to send out personal data, neither to “the algorithms” nor anywhere else.
> So, today, you either surrender and give up on your personal data or have to avoid producing data in the first place, which is hard work.
It is only hard work to avoid being monitored and spied on if we use applications with built-in spyware. Which is why we should keep spyware out of LibreOffice.
> But how about a third way, where all personal data is stored locally on users’ devices and only the algorithms are sent to the data to learn?
1. It may not be as bad as simply sending all personal data, but then – maximum spying might be illegal anyway, so that’s not something to compare against unless you’re the government.
2. One you start spying on people and collecting their data, I’m sure you’ll find excuses or loopholes for accessing more of that data. Let’s not go down that road.
> But most important is the backing of our community. And we want you to help us and polypoly to do things right
It seems you want to create public support for this move after it was resisted in earlier discussions in narrower forums. Hence this disingenuous and manipulate blog post.
Part of Free and Open Source software is freedom to make your own choices. Having software or better yet spyware in a product such as LibreOffice will hurt its reputation. Would you download and use software that is claiming to have a freedom from “locked in” file formats to be spied upon? No. Most people who use commercial software just hit “Agree” when it comes to the terms of use of that software, Not many people read or understand software licensing agreements. Often these companies can keep tabs on you when you agree. EU countries are better at preventing this than us here in the United States. LibreOffice shouldn’t get into this kind of thing. Software “freedom” means not being spied upon. If there is a problem as to what should be the “standard user interface” then give people a choice when first setting up LibreOffice or inform people on how to change it. Keep LibreOffice “free” in terms of freedom of use without spyware and free in cost . i appreciate LibreOffice and those who contribute to it in ways they can. But spying on people shouldn’t be a part of the product.
There isn’t a singular definition of spyware, however I think this Britannica article is a good overview.
https://www.britannica.com/technology/spyware
“spyware, type of computer program that is secretly installed on a person’s computer or mobile device in order to obtain the owner’s private information, such as lists of websites visited, passwords, and credit card numbers.”
The key point here is ‘secretly installed,’ informed consent is considerably different. No one, from what I can tell, is advocating for data collection mechanisms to be installed in LibreOffice and users not be made aware.
Now the debate on monetization is different, there is a discussion that could be had there. I do not for a moment believe that the intentions of TDF or polypoly is disingenuous. Whether polypoly are the correct partners again is a discussion point but the premise of the collection of data through conformed consent is a reasonable proposition to improve LibreOffice for the benefit of the community of users.
I used the word “spyware” to mean software which spies on you.
There’s the assumption that people would not give informed consent to something that is detrimental to their interest, that seems to underlie the Britannica definition. But if the rhetoric used to ask people for consent would be similar to this post, then you would have _mis_informed consent…
As for polypoly’s intentions: The are laid out plainly on their website; and are not mentioned in this post. So, there is nothing which requires believe: The dis-ingenuity is right there.
I’m not opposed in principle to any mechanism for voluntarily allowing user data to be collected and processed somehow; it would depend on the specifics such proposals. But polypoly is not the way to go here.
I can also see if Polypoly or something similar is installed in LibeOffice, whether it is voluntary or not splitting up the LibreOffice Community. LibreOffice split off from OpenOffice because of Oracle and the chance that OpenOffice may not be there anymore. “Spyware” whether voluntary or involuntary doesn’t belong in LibreOffice. Surveys and choices when setting up the program will help with improvements and in setting up the user interface the way people want. People will I feel avoid using programs with spyware. It would mean a loss of my support of LibreOffice or I would seriously limit using it. I donate money to the project monthly as I feel it is a worthwhile endeavor. I will probably stop if this takes place.
This feels like a solution in search of a problem, and an extremely complex solution at that. I don’t see how this can help in practical terms to improve LibreOffice. What it surely *will* accomplish is to create major controversy and ruin the project’s reputation, whether there is any technical basis for privacy concerns or not. Just take the Audacity debacle as a poignant example of what will happen. I understand that fixing bugs is easier said than done. But implementing an arcane data collection framework in and of itself won’t fix the bugs. Why not simply start working on the concrete UX issues and obvious bugs that users have already explicitly identified and reported? The KDE project’s “15-minute Bug” initiative is a great example of how this could be tackled. If a simple method like that is not deemed to be acceptable then I can only assume that somebody at the Document Foundation has ulterior motives in pushing for this dubious new implementation.
@ all:
I agree to Eyal Rozenberg. I know of some people using LibreOffice. Most of them are interested in low costs, not few use it because they simply are on Linux and… using Linux the alternatives are comparably limited, because more software producers offer their products on Windows than on Linux – still many more. The “User eXperience” is by far the most rare reason to become a LO user.
My reason was many yeas ago cost, another reason was because of easy accessibility it was quite simple (in comparison) to train with this thing and get comfortable with (that was the time when LibreOffice was not existing at all and the ancestor OpenOffice took this role.
But some day people realized, that making software costs money and… those with the ideas wanted to get money… and OpenOffice had become a ballast… what in the end made some developers fear to experience the end of OpenOffice. May be they also realized the turbolences about LibreOffice and the lack of support… to make long story: They decided to fork OpenOffice and – voilá – LibreOffice was born.
But… the global situation has become much more worse than these days and developers more and more become coward and dishonest. Coward, because they lost more and more courage to discuss in an open manner the necessity of making money to employ programmers (because especially big projects are very hard to run on voluntary basis for some reasons). That led to the term “dishonest”, which basically came with cowardness, because they didn’t want to throw their projects. This brought “investors” into the game – and many problems exploded. Soon a not little amount of users realized the data theft and suspect bad intentions (what basically was false – the developers mainly did not have negative intentions, they only were way too coward… but negative intentions were the majority of intentions of these so-called “investors”).
Nowadays more and more projects become growing bigger problem cases, because there are still too little developers honest and open enough to face the truth and … unfortunately this problem has gathered a new quality. Meanwhile there are developer teams, who realize, that even selling software is not as profitable as to open their projects for data thieves, also named “investors” (there are more names, but… names are pointless and in the end only words).
But… to shorten this text: Instead of offering LibreOffice in a paid model (comparable to the open source project Ardour, another DAW, t h e big DAW coming from the Linux world) and selling only the executables for money (what even could be as flexible as Ardour does this) they decide to better make LibreOffice to a basis of sold data theft.
Currently LO 7.4.2.3 is completely sick and a huge collection of bugs.
I hereby declare n o t to support being spied by no-matter-who. I’m willing to pay license fees, b u t under circumstances! This implies to care for primarily stability issues in order to make it being able to run during a working day usually without crashes.
Currently 7.4.2.3 crashes my Debian machine in constant use more than 10 times a day (!!!), where only 5-10% of my work is done, because apart from crashing the machine it sometimes ruins my documents and templates and… even when running (BTW my CPU is being a Ryzen 9 5950X not the slowest, 64G RAM not the smallest…) it is god awful slow in comparison to 7.3.x.x.
B u t to be spied on is – under such circumstances a real impertinent!
As we’re invited to express ourselves, here’s my take – aside.
I’m not convinced “a stunning user experience” applies to any other office suites (apart from the marketing departments), and probably not anymore to any application.
while there’ room for improvement in UX, I think a better move would be in educating users, particularly kids in using properly a word processor (styles instead of wordart, eg) : there’s a trial in France which could inspire you : “LibreOffice des écoles” is an UI of Libreoffice that evolves with the age of the kids (here’s the link, but it’s in french : https://wiki.primtux.fr/doku.php/libreoffice-ecoles )
This initiative is quite interesting (irrespective of the blog post)! Are there some videos of people taking such workshops? Or instructional videos that are part of the initiative? French audio is fine, I’ll manage avec mon pauvre francais.
I have nothing to do with this initiative, so the closest to your demand I can find concerning this initiative is a youtube channel from one of the creators : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMNs9dhtrsue3hBdpyzFVGQ
I’m a nerdish while male and I think LibreOffice should have started gathering voluntary user statistics ages ago. Some crucial points:
1. Be absolutely clear to user that data is gathered.
2. Give option to share less or more data (or no data at all).
3. Share the (anonymized) usage data openly.
I’m not sure if the proposed Polypoly solution is the way to go, but in general I would be very much willing to support LibreOffice with my usage data.
This is the Product Person at polypoly. I want to add some things:
1) polypoly never receives any data.
We actively do not want any data, we don’t want to run servers that keep data, we will never collect data unless the law forces us to. (For example, we do need to keep a list of our cooperative members.) We firmly believe that your private data should never leave your private devices, period.
2) We do not sell any data.
First off, we don’t have any, and secondly, we think that this is unethical. And we do not want to enable others to access private data without explicit, informed, and active user consent.
3) What we do, is that we provide the infrastructure that enables individual users to allow organisations to pay them for running algorithms on their devices. These algorithms can be given access to personal data at runtime, but they cannot send anything out of the device without the express consent of the affected end users. And these end users can always see and inspect that information before and after it is being sent. Again: If the users do not actively and explicitly give informed consent to this, nothing will be transmitted or evaluated.
4) Our software is Open Source.
You can implement the on-device data collection and analysis entirely without our involvement. In fact, we purposely build the infrastructure so that all data handling can be done without any involvement of us. Of course we would welcome if this results in a partnership, but we do not want to impose.
5) As Product Person, I do believe it is important and useful to collect insights from ethically observing user behaviour instead of relying on anecdotal reports. The latter will always be biased, and most certainly not include the more “casual” people who use your product, but come from those who are more involved and eager. That involvement is great and commendable, but it does lead to blind spots and survivor bias (you know that picture of the plane with all the red dots on the wings, right?): You’ll only learn the problems of successful LibreOffice users, but not when someone stopped using a certain functionality because it was too clunky but not important enough for them to report it.
6) yes, only EU citizens can buy shares in the polypoly cooperative.
This is a deliberate move to keep the legal accountability within the european legal space. The idea is that the operations of the european polypoly coop is restricted the Europe, so that non-EU legislators, especially the US, have no foothold over this. The creation of affiliated but legally independent cooperatives in Africa, India and the US is already planned.
I do acknowledge that you absolutely have to make sure LibreOffice stays clear of the Trust Thermocline (https://therightstuff.medium.com/the-trust-thermocline-explains-how-companies-suddenly-lose-customers-and-employees-2657c9535e6a), so please, do what is right for your project. If we can support that, all the better! I care about FLOSS and want more of it, not less.
> 1) polypoly never receives any data.
polypoly doesn’t receive data, it receives money. Or at least, it hopes to.
> 2) We do not sell any data.
You don’t sell data, you sell/broker the ability to analyze people’s data.
> 3) What we do, is that we provide the infrastructure that enables individual users to allow organisations to pay them for running algorithms on their devices.
Right.
> These algorithms can be given access to personal data at runtime, but they cannot send anything out of the device without the express consent of the affected end users.
In an earlier discussion we established how it is easy to manipulate people into giving consent. And even when it’s hard – if you ask a million people for consent, you’ll get some fraction of them consenting without really understanding what’s going to happen.
Anyway – if you want to offer something like this to LO users – you can go ahead and write an extension. But I don’t believe this should be part of the LO codebase.
Mr Rozenberg, while I agree with a number of the points that you have drawn attention to your arguments make you sound like a religious zealot and that you are here to be the ‘gatekeeper’ for our personal decisions, which clearly you are not.
As an independent company Polypoly like every other has to pay the bills so why are you so adamant that money should not be a factor in providing the service and expertise in this area. The development of LibreOffice is predominantly paid for by for profit companies. This does not negate in anyway the trustworthiness of these companies.
If your aversion is the monetary factor for Polypoly then would you still be so opposed if an equivalent service was delivered for free? Remember that it has never been stated that it would be mandatory to submit your data to Polypoly, your previous assertion of spyware was software that spies on you, if you give explicit permission for this then it is no longer spyware is it as you have agreed to the data collection. And I believe that no one at the Document Foundation would ever make the decision that the data collection would be switched on without end user consent.
The use of extensions will never work as too few user of LibreOffice would use them and the aggregation and analysis of data would not be possible. Perhaps the agreement to collect data could automatically install an extension as you propose and then the module would be completely independent of the shipping binaries.
Indeed, I’m trying to prevent LibreOffice from including code to spy on its users. This would be bad enough even if it were non-mandatory. The attempt to claim that such spying is somehow and acceptable benign because consent was given, or because the spying is not secret – that may help establish non-criminality; but ethically, it is out of the question.
I am in favor of enabling opt-in data collection.
What I do not understand: why it needs Polypoly? The decentralized data storage, request structure etc. all sounds interesting but I find it hard to understand what the advantage would be over a more conventional model that collects non-identifying infos on users and publishes data only in an aggregate form.
(Which is what the Wikimedia Foundation does afaic)
I’d prefer to see design decisions based on data and I’d expect most users would be happy to provide user data to support LibreOffice development. Regardless, it would still amount to a very large survey.
The proposal is to collect and store data on the user’s device and download the required data s needed with user’s permission. Seems much more reasonable than commercial practice. The fact it would use a polypoly service seems irrelevant other than making best use of limited resources.
I’m prefer donate my data usage directly to libreoffice
I think there are some misconceptions here. First and most important: I am a member of the polypoly cooperative (it is 5€ and you should consider this too), but I am not invested / involved / employed or such by the polypoly enterprise, nor do I have any function in the cooperative. All I do is voluntary work in my spare time.
So why am I pushing this then, for a company that only wants to make money by producing spyware? I think these are the two main concerns here. So…
*** Free Software and making money ***
I wonder that a complaint about this even arises from the LibreOffice ecosystem, as there are quite some commercial players around. We all have to make money. I personally would like to see much more business arising around Free Software and not less.
But most important – as all polypoly does is Free Software, they are actually taking the business risk that others will just take the code and fork. To prevent this, they have to be good Free Software citizens. And that is all that counts. If they behave well, I am willing to help. And in my eyes they do. All the dual license code is owned by the cooperative, not the enterprise. The cooperative is set up very well and democratic. Wanting to work with LibreOffice definitely proves their will to be fair players and part of the Free Software ecosystem.
Having said that – we will always need to judge them on what they actually do. I am more than convinced that we should welcome them and give them a chance. Because it is for the good of Libre Office too, as…
*** Is polypoly spyware? ***
Perhaps let us start with wikipedia says about it:
“Spyware is software with malicious behaviour that aims to gather information about a person or organization and send it to another entity in a way that harms the user” (Wikipedia)
In my eyes, calling polypoly “spyware” with this definition in mind is simply wrong. Yes, we want to allow the users to privately record and utillize their usage data. But we will never force them to do that. So the behaviour cannot be called malicious, as it will always only be an option. Also the data will never leave the users property unless the user agrees to this. This way we do not only want to prevent harm to the user.
In fact, we want achieve just the opposite: We want to enable the users to work sensibly with their very private resource “Personal Data”. The long term goal for me personally is to empower citizens. If all of us would collectively say: “Only organizations that are CO2 neutral are allowed to get access to my data”, we would very likely speed up the needed transformation process in the industry (just one example). And polypoly creates the infrastructure to enable things like that.
So, please do not call polypoly spyware. It does nothing in the shadow, it provides control to the users and does not harm them.
*** Why Libre Office? ***
I have worked in and with the design team of LibreOffice for a long time. I do know how desperately we needed real usage data. Aggregated data. We have no interest in individual data. Only real, representative data allows us to optimize. Imagine you asked to do a database optimization, but cannot read any reliable benchmarks how the database is performing. This is exactly the situation the UX team is in. We get shouts here and there, complains, louder or more quite, but nothing reliable, nothing we can optimize / benchmark against. Polypoly creates exactly this option for us.
Polypoly allows us to access aggregated personal data on a voluntary base, without harming anybodys privacy. This will allow us to improve the UX of LibreOffice. Polypoly is 100% Free Software and we can always stop working with them if they misbehave.
Doing this all on our own is not a good idea either. Most important, this is not part of our core project. Instead gathering more representative and better user feedback is a problem we share with lots of projects. And like we are not all doing our own git, we should not all do our own “personal data manager”.
The topic of personal data is also too sensible to make this a side project. We should be very glad that there is a whole organization dedicated to doing this right.
Last but not least: Any approach that is focussed on a single application, will not allow the insights we are interested in. Because from those users that allow us to, we would e.g. like to know in which situations they use Writer and when e.g. Kate (The Kate people would like to know the same). So, only doing a LibreOffice data collector will not be sufficient and is not option in my eyes. We need dedicated infrastructure we can use across projects.
Summing it up:
The current situation how personal data is being handled is a catastrophe. Polypoly tries to establish a better overall system and we as LibreOffice can help – polypoly and ourselves. Our users need to opt-in to store any data and we can always opt-out of working with polypoly. We will never be dependent on polypoly – and if anyone knows about a better approach than the polypoly one, please let me know.
For now, please continue to closely follow the cooperation, be critical but fair and give polypoly the chance they deserve.
> I am a member of the polypoly cooperative (it is 5€ and you should consider this too), but I am not invested / involved / employed or such by the polypoly enterprise,
polypoly is a for-profit entity, and the default investment amount offered is €100 . Its own website says so.
> as all polypoly does is Free Software
No, that’s not all of what it does. It brokers access to people’s private data in exchange for money.
> Free Software and making money … I wonder that a complaint about this even arises from the LibreOffice ecosystem
Nobody complained about you making money. Just – don’t make it off of people’s personal data.
> We all have to make money.
Well, we live under Capitalism, yes. So, go get a job – hopefully, a respectable one, not in spying on people – and make some money. Want to make money off of LibreOffice? Still ok! Offer to develop custom features for pay; offer to train and consult; offer to do integration work with existing systems; that’s all fine. Don’t put your hands on people’s personal data though.
> Perhaps let us start with wikipedia says about it:
So, you choose a restrictive definition to declare that while your software spies on us, and uses our personal data for polypoly’s investors’ benefit, it isn’t spyware. Great!
> Yes, we want to allow the users to privately record and utillize their usage data.
“allow”? The users don’t want and don’t need that. You allow _third parties_ to utilize users’ data.
> The current situation how personal data is being handled is a catastrophe.
Before reading your two posts, I was skeptical and apprehensive about polypoly. But now that I see how much you engage in gaslighting and manipulation, I’m very certain your organization is not to be trusted.
LO users’ personal data is being handled just fine. That is, it not shared with for-profit entities like Polypoly and not analyzed for the benefit of unknown parties.
Eyal, things don’t become true, just by stating them.
Easiest prove for that is to look at the website https://polypoly.net/en/ and at least for me it says:
” Become part of the movement!
Just € 5 to become a member of Europe’s first data cooperative.”
Your whole argumentation seems to me to derive from a general “Personal Data is bad” attitude. I can respect that opinion as your personal one, but sorry, you cannot speak for “the users” here. I know for sure that there are a lot of people in LibreOffice open to this experiment. So, yes, some users will be against it and they should never be forced to have to use it. LibreOffice always needs to work without polypoly. I don’t know how to say more clearly that this is an option, an experiment and should always be stopped if it does thing wrong.
What I cannot respect though is the way you attack me personally. I am not doing gaslighting or manipulation. I try to explain what is been done. I am arguing for my personal convictions. You are welcome to challenge everything I say, but with facts or clear, precise questions, not allegations.
To clearly state my motivation here:
In my opinion, we live in a world where spyware is the norm and this is an existing catastrophe for each and every person and the society as a whole. Big tech is running successful business on this. Well actually, they are not even Big Tech anymore, they are Data Brokers with a Tech Department. I truly believe that the polypoly approach is much better than the current reality. And I also believe that it is far away from being perfect. So let’s follow this path, be critical, try to improve everything, so the high moral standards we are met and in the end we perhaps find something even better than polypoly.
My motivation is to change how the world deals with digital personal data to the better. I am also convinced that personal data is good, society will progress much better with personal data being democratically available.
Gaslighting as usual – linking to the site which is not where people _actually_ join. When you actually try to join, visiting:
https://join.polypoly.coop/s/polypoly
The first option you see is actually 10,000 EUR, for 2,000 shares. Yes, one share costs 5 EUR, but that’s really not the default offer. If you follow the links from the site you linked to, you eventually get to:
https://polypoly-citizens.eu/en/
and there, the default amount suggested today (top left corner option) suggested is not 100 EUR – it’s actually 100 _shares_, i.e. 500 EUR: https://i.imgur.com/kZt4E0S.png
and the websites explain how you get a return on your investment. Can you buy only a single share? Sure, like you can buy a single share of Microsoft or Google or Apple.
It’s funny that you would mention that things don’t become true simply because they are stated.
> My motivation is to change how the world deals with digital personal data to the better.
No, your motivation is to change it for the worse – to contaminate even free software with spyware. But – your motivation doesn’t even matter all that much: It’s the polypoly investors’ motivation that’s important; and their motivation is to get a return on their investment by selling access to our personal data. I hope we don’t let you do that.
Hi! Whats the latest update on this? Has LO started sharing data? Does LO still plan on sharing data? If yes, when? Thank u for update.
The project is on hold. We stated interest in principle at Polypoly based on the replies here and other social media. We are aware that not everyone is happy about the idea so it would be integrated ideally as extension that could be uninstalled completely. But so far no one volunteered to implement it (although basic functionality for metrics on UNO commands exists for years).