If there was some medium I would do it. And by that I mean a card that could be re-loaded by the owner (me) and pay from it. I have no qualms about my name.
There is no open source project–as sacred as it is to me–that deserves my name, address, bank info, bank card account #, phone number and email, and there is no third party that does either. If they don’t want my cash on my terms, I will keep it in my pocket. I think there’s hundreds of thousands like me. I know there’s a compromise, I just don’t know what it is.
A lot of places are quite big on pre-paid debit cards which function like this, it’s a bit like buying a universal gift card.
I believe even PayPal in the US does (or at least did) allow for creation of virtual debit cards for every transaction, so you could keep your information as private as you wanted.
No such features for me here though, or I’d certainly throw a little bit around - there was a particularly helpful dev for a specific piece of software I needed who accepted donations through ko-fi, but that platform is wishy-washy around what information they actually pass along to the end-recipient so I wasn’t comfortable handing it over, even though I’d happily have shot them at least the cost of a beer (and at today’s beer prices, that’s still a nice little chunk of change for taking 5 minutes to answer a question ).
I predicted there was a compromise and you all are accommodating me, thanks. I’m writing all this down to see which option is best for me. I can deal this username and transaction. No problem at all.
edit: thank you for that
Their own privacy FAQ advises that recipients only see your username (or whatever name you choose if you just donate anonymously), but then goes on to expand on that with a section written in what I would describe as a “we’re trying our best not to say that we’re indirectly passing your details to the recipient by handwaving it as a possibility based on the payment processor” kind of way. Quoting the relevant sections:
(I have absolutely zero interest in converting my PayPal to a ‘business account’ - I don’t even like having a regular PayPal account, but unfortunately needs must)
(And then a link to stripe’s privacy policy which talks solely about them being a payment processor and holds no clear answers about where the buck stops with regards to any data you might plug into it)
As you can see, ultimately both of these “answers” are actually non-answers to the very simple question of “does the person I donate to have any way of seeing my information”, instead the question is talked-around and obfuscated with handing off responsibility to the payment processors and hoping that instills enough confidence to make you open your wallet - which in my case, it does not
I decided to go check what is shown by clicking on some of the transactions (I normally just looked at the quick summary), and I now see that it does indeed show their full name and email address used for their Ko-fi account.
So it’s full name, Ko-fi email, username, the money they sent, and a transaction ID.
So, it’s essentially the same information (OR LESS) for those who use a paid streaming service like Netflix, Spotify, HBO, Amazon Prime Video, etc. *hint hint*
That it is, and for me personally the difference is that while I don’t like it at all, if I absolutely must provide my information to something, having that information stored with a large, established, and fully legally represented entity like that gives me plenty of options for recourse should anything unsavoury happen to it, vs that information being just handed off to some random individual for the sake of my feeling charitable having significantly less (and likely, much more difficult to exercise) options.
The calculus is incredibly different no matter how you slice it, unfortunately.
FWIW though, I don’t use any of those services either
I’m glad that I was right about ko-fi though, but at the same time disappointed that they did indeed use such a shady, weasel-worded way of trying to obfuscate what is, for me, a significant privacy issue.
That’s interesting to me. On one side yes, a larger org has a better chance of being tracked and their leaks being traced to them for legal action.
On the same side though, I 110% expect any large org (especially streaming and sales services) to sell my data legally.
I have more worry about my data getting sold to continually less scrupulous 4th and 5th party data vendors until everyone has their hands on it.
The data collected by a small org may be less scrupulous at the start, but the datasets are less valued by those data vendors, so they might not even sell at all.
I trust my data to find itself less places on the actual small vendors, a crapshoot with the medium vendors, and it always gets around(just a bit slower) in the large vendors.
My metric for this is spam calls lol. I give my phone out rarely enough and have a system that tricks spam robots into thinking I’m a robot so they stop calling. Any given time I give it my phone number to a company, I can tell if and when they sold my phone information, by the uptick in spam. It’s not perfect, there’s definitely resale noise, where I haven’t given my phone or but I start getting the calls again, but it’s something.
For myself personally, the calculus involved is less about my data being sold (because lets not kid ourselves, it’s all out there and it’s all being sold as soon as someone’s willing to pay the asking price for it) and more about my privacy as an individual.
IE, if I were a customer of Amazon, I am one name in a database of hundreds of millions of names. There’s an element of being lost in all the noise that I’m really not worried about - I’m a single datapoint in a massive dataset, there’s no reason for me to be singled out.
For a platform like Ko-Fi, that individual creator now has my name. I’m no longer lost in the noise, because I’m part of a much, much smaller dataset. I have no reason to trust that any given individual that I might donate to on the platform isn’t going to do something I would rather they didn’t with access to my information.
So… You’ll never donate to am OPEN source project unless your privacy is at least practically guaranteed? The same projects that publish their earnings for transparency and accountability?
scratches head
Anyway, I understand your points. Even agree somewhat. We all gotta do what we gotta do.
Based on where you live, it may be difficult to get paid for developing open source apps without using a service that doesn’t respect users’ privacy.
For where I live, I am forced to use PayPal or Payoneer for most things. Crypto isn’t even a thought, cash is out of the question, and wire transfers are also a pain.
So, what can a developer do about all of that? Absolutely nothing.
It has nothing to do with the nature of the project, but ultimately - for me it’s a very simple decision based on whether or not my privacy can be maintained to a level that I’m comfortable with when making transactions, especially with individuals, where I have no reason to trust them with my information and limited recourse to do anything about it should something happen to that information that I’m not happy about.
That’s either anonymity (very difficult but not impossible) or pseudo-anonymity through obscurity (being one amongst many and so being ‘lost in the crowd’).
I’m completely aware that this is a very extreme position and almost certainly far more strict than most people like to be for their own personal comfort (and maintaining such a strict stance usually brings nothing but inconvenience, so it’s not like I’m making my own life any easier here!), but it’s my position all the same.
I stopped using FF, quietly, without telling anyone, about 3 months ago. Not for all the same reasons he did, [don’t give a hoot about the Foundation and their money and you-know-who’s influence] just the awful-and-getting-worse security the last year. Libre and Mullvad are fine for my needs.
I’ve started using Librewolf as well. Didn’t work at first, weirdly, but now it’s smooth. I feel saddened to abandon the fox as it was my first and only browser, but I really despise Mozilla these days.
First rule of Linux…tell everyone you run linux
Second rule of Linux…
I understand. They crossed the line when I got the normal system updates this year, installed them rebooted, went on with my life. A few days later I wanted to adjust something in Firefox Settings and Lo and Behold some NEW TELEMETRY feature was there, and enabled, and the opted me in. That pissed me of and it still does. They violated my trust. This new feature did not even make the forums. It was all on the downlow.
).
