question

n0g00l4g avatar image
n0g00l4g asked

Privacy - Use of Google services

Hi,

I fully understand and agree that the services provided by Google are great and appreciated by many.

I would like to challenge you Victron Energy in using alternative solutions to the Google services being used in your website / products. This could be a very long text on the privacy issues related, but to make it short, by using these services, you are making your users/customers pay with their data.

Could you please think about using alternative solutions which are more oriented to the privacy protection? Replacing reCAPTCHA with hCaptcha for example? Using Open Streetmap instead of Google Maps?

Google & Co's behavior is more than questionable and there are many lawsuits related to privacy issues and Google.

Thank you.

ESS
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Guy Stewart (Victron Community Manager) avatar image
Guy Stewart (Victron Community Manager) answered ·

Hi @N0G00l4g,

I appreciate the feedback.

Unfortunately for this community at least, I am using an embedded spam protection tool which uses the reCAPTCHA for new accounts, after a couple of posts it stops. I will also pass on the feedback to that team to see if they can make the non-google alternative available.

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zeron avatar image
zeron answered ·

I got curious so I checked my VRM home page and it's already displaying the map with OSM tiles (hosted on Victron web servers) but... network tool shows google maps script being loaded still? Is it some leftover script someone forgot or is it being used for something else?

And reCAPTCHA isn't just bad for privacy, it's horribly bad for the user experience of users who enjoy their privacy because there is no way around it : I can choose to block the google maps domain and not have their maps shown to me anywhere but I can't opt out of ReCAPTCHA. Any time I used browsers with strict privacy settings, reCAPTCHA started punishing me (the IP wasn't changing, so after a dozen or two completed captchas and light web traffic it can't keep flagging me as "very likely to be a robot" based on its data) by asking me to complete 3-4-5 captchas in a row on every website (without any errors in my answers)

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Guy Stewart (Victron Community Manager) avatar image Guy Stewart (Victron Community Manager) ♦♦ commented ·
On this community site at least it is account reputation based, so after a few successful posts with your account it will stop.


I would also prefer to have as little friction as possible for users, but the amount of work it cuts out in spam clean up means it needs to stay on for now. I will try and get a non-google alternative though.

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zeron avatar image zeron Guy Stewart (Victron Community Manager) ♦♦ commented ·
On forums it's indeed more than acceptable to have something harsh for the first few posts, at least I don't remember being bothered by the recaptcha tests here with cookies allowed for the victron domain !
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