Some privacy questions

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I am new here and haven’t seen much yet except for my installation on the Raspberry Pi using rp-imager.

Why do I need to provide my email address for a privacy-friendly application? It is even mentioned that it will not be used, so why?

Why do I have to disclose my place of residence? It can actually be beneficial, but it shouldn’t be mandatory.

Why is the maintainer of the software primarily on Twitter and not on Mastodon?

It gives the impression that “privacy-friendly” is just a pretext to attract more customers.

Wouldn’t it be worth mentioning that the community platform is self-hosted? That is indeed great and an indicator of privacy friendliness.

The note “Install for free” is almost laughable in 2024. Free in the sense of no cost is true for almost all smart home programs and has been for many years. Gladys Assistant is free software under the Apache License, which means not only the installation is free, but the entire software is free in terms of a free license.

This also means that modifying and redistributing the modified software under the same license is possible, which should be mentioned on the website.

But the most important question is, why is Gladys Assistant privacy-friendly? Is it as privacy-friendly as Home Assistant or even more so?

Thanks in advance

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Hello and welcome to the community :wave:

I will let the founder answer more globally about the privacy friendly topic.

About the email, it’s used as login to secure your instance. It’s how most of the account creations work and how most of the users understand a login. You can check the code, it’s not sent outside your instance. You can use any email, even a non existing one.
Do you think about an alternative with a pseudo?

About the home location, it’s used to fetch weather and to trigger scenes when you enter/get out of your home (if you Wan to use owntracks on your mobile). Maybe used for timezone also (need to be checked).
Same as email, no data is going out of your instance.
I will see if we can make it optional but some services will be disabled without home location.

Don’t hesitate if you have other questions or want to propose improvements (the website is also open-sourced).

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