Privacy
I think we need to talk about privacy…
I would not have opened this issue, if I was not greeted with a whole inline Google search page after a "wrong" click on the wrong button.
So…
Current behaviour
I mean, I accept, you currently have one slider that basically means "enable internet connection" or not.
If off, I assume there are no connections at all, but also some nice features are obviously missing. If one, you may also accidentally get a Google search in your music player… wtf…?
What is wrong
In short: I don't want that my music player is sending what I hear/click/… to Google.
- You may not believe it, but there are people not wanting to use Google… for several reasons. And you just make a, as it seems, hardcoded dependency on that web service build-in into the music player for something simple as searching for an album cover, really?
- Also, I wonder where/how/if that build-in browser stores cookies, executes JS and all that things…?
- As for other services like song text and the song information, I can assume where it gets data from (Wikipedia e.g.), but that is not obvious to me. Especially not, before the data is sent. (also BTW, that is useful to know, as Wikipedia results sometimes may also be false-positives, i.e. be about a different topic)
- Also (and this may be enough to answer in this issue) is the data like song texts and Wikipedia data actually cached or is it always re-requested?
What I want
- As for the Google thing: You could just let me select a search engine. (if needed for this feature) This can be as easy as providing a search string template like
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%s
. - However, the real problem is bigger, of course. I would like to have the thing you have in the "Web" tab of the settings, but with a subtab or so for each service/website you use and a slider to activate & deactivate. So I can e.g. deactivate all data transmission to Google, but activate it for Wikipedia or so, depending on what service I'd like to use.
- Also, I hope, you never send data over HTTP (unencrypted) connections. This would be bad, too. (And I'd like to know that, if it is really impossible.)
- In general, I want to know what happens as a user, where my data goes to and want to control it.
Side notes
I really don't like the hype of it at all, but maybe consider the GDPR a little. It has nice details on what users may expect and what "privacy by default" should be possible.
Edited by rugk