Please don’t flame me too bad, I understand that although privacy and libre software are important to many in the Linux community, my opinions may be outside the scope of consideration for some and I respect that.
Personally, conscientious consumerism and privacy are some of the primary reasons I use Linux. I prefer community>private business>corporate when I am choosing products and services.
-System76
About 8 years ago I purchased a laptop from System76, the customer service was incredible and the machine exceeded my expectations in build quality and performance.
Recently I’ve been in the market for a smaller machine, like a Thinkpad X1, StarBook 14 or System76 Lemur.
Last week, when I visited the System76 website they used Plausible’s open source analytics on the home page (which is a great alternative to Google’s proprietary hardware fingerprinting algorithm), but once I added the laptop to my cart to checkout, I noticed the third-party trackers, apis.google and ajax.googleapis load on the webpage. Google’s reCAPTCHA was also required to complete the purchase. Hell, even Discord has switched to hCaptcha at this point citing their laughable “Gamer Privacy First” policy.
IMHO, I find it hypocritical that System76 does so much great work disabling Intel’s IME and contributing to coreboot, but chooses to embed proprietary tracking software on their website when open source alternatives are readily available.
- Reaching out to System 76
After completing 14 reCAPTCHA’s I was finally able to get a dialogue with Stetson at System 76. He said that “System 76 takes user data privacy and security extremely seriously, but they would continue to use Google services.” His recommended solution was placing the order over the phone if I wasn’t comfortable having third-party tracking during checkout.
This is not a solution for me because I don’t want to do business with a company that monetizes user data for profit. In my experience, companies that monetize data (Alphabet, Meta, etc…) offer web services cheaper than competitors that don’t, in exchange for access to user data. So, if you’re getting a commercial service cheaper from a company that sells your user’s data, you’re also profiting from the sale by paying a lower premium for those services.
Personally, I do not think you’re taking user privacy “extremely” seriously if you’re running third party trackers and choosing reCAPTCHA (not a privacy respecting service) over hCaptcha on your website.
I really like System 76 and I want to support them with my next purchase, but presently I feel like they are saying one thing and doing another and choosing privacy respecting libre software some of the time when it suits their marketing, but proprietary anti-consumer tracking services when it’s more profitable.
Purist, hard-line stuff like this will honestly just get you nowhere in 2023. I get where you’re coming from, but it’s simply not realistic. This is what browser extensions are for.
I don’t understand what’s not realistic about expecting from a company that markets itself as privacy focused to not add surveillance fascist services to their website. It’s not like they demand system76 to implement something crazy difficult. Quite the opposite, they just want them to not do something. That shit doesn’t add itself to a website. So just don’t fucking do it and you’re good. What’s unrealistic about that?
Being a fatalist will get you some places I personally don’t want to go to.
I dunno, us ordinary folks get a lot of benefit from the battles purists have waged before us. And sometimes they win big time.
I always wonder how those purists’ lives are better by being… like that. Is there an actual benefit or improvement?
It is realistic. I don’t buy much online, but I very rarely had to fill out a captcha, or even load scripts for one.
- Fazoo ( @Fazoo@lemmy.ml ) 31•1 year ago
They just resell Chinese laptops anyway, or used to. I opted for a Framework laptop this time.
I got the Pangolin, and have no regrets, but yea if I was in the market again I too would be going with Framework
I also plan too. Especially now that they offer AMD models.
This. As much as I really, really want them to be successful, their hardware is meh at best. Framework has my attention.
- dingleberry ( @dingleberry@discuss.tchncs.de ) 30•1 year ago
What a nothingburger. How do you people navigate day to day life?
Say what you want, this is a totally real complaint. System76 is not honest in their communication.
Many payment providers would want websites to implement CAPTCHA for blocking spam and fraud attempts.
I’m sorry, but you’re just going to have to walk to a store and pay in cash if you don’t want to have any data tracking done at all. Online you’ll often have to pick one or the other: data tracking, or flimsy security/data protection. The phone solution is appropriate in my humble opinion, but you’re welcome to hold your own views on your principles. If you’re hard set against a company tracking ANYBODY via 3rd parties to that level, then I bet you will be very hard-pressed to ever find a computer through an online marketplace from ANY company that will fit that bill perfectly and suits your other needs.
Many payment providers would want websites to implement CAPTCHA for blocking spam and fraud attempts.
This is why. They’re using Stripe, and they require it if you have any sort of carding attack, or other fraud attempts. They’ll disable your account otherwise. And, this isn’t just Stripe, I’ve encountered it with all payment providers I’ve implemented.
There’s still a business, and they need to be profitable, so they’re doing things a business does to stay profitable. But they’ve stayed very true to their philosophy.
Is the use of these APIs during the checkout process enough to make you go to a different company? What company would you go to that doesn’t use any trackers?
Yes, as I stated in the beginning of my post, personally I value privacy and ethical business practices and imo, if you sell hardware, make money on hardware while not additionally monetizing your customer’s data through discounted web services. So the fact that they use services monetizing user as a way to increase profit margins is enough to make me choose another company. The only company I know of that sells a Linux Laptop not partaking in this sort of thing is Purism and they have very little selection. I’m open to other suggestions if someone knows of another company?
You might also consider the saying “perfect is the enemy of good”. If you can find something perfect, that’s great, but if not… Don’t go with the worst option.
They themselves are almost certainly not getting paid for the user data. Rather they might use Google analytics and such to know who the target audience for their products is. So they could pay for better ads.
They’re using Stripe, and they require it if you have any sort of carding attack, or other fraud attempts. They’ll disable your account otherwise. And, this isn’t just Stripe, I’ve encountered it with all payment providers I’ve implemented.
Ecommerce pretty much requires it these days, and yes, most gateways require Google’s as it’s the “industry standard” at the moment.
It’s likely something out of their control. I imagine their payment processor either uses it, or requires the site to use it. Mostly to combat automated fraud.
You likely won’t find any site, that has online shopping, that doesn’t use some sort of way to gatekeep against this behavior, unless it’s crypto-based. And even then it likely still has something like that. Even if the site redirects to Paypal, you’re gonna face that.
Your approach simply isn’t realistic to the modern web. You can try uBlock, but blocking those connections likely will make the site ultimately not work for you.
First of all, they could just have been honest at tell that.
Second, you do not try ublock, you use ublock. That’s a minimum of you care about privacy. It does not break anything.
What you try is umatrix.Could be it’s a requirements for their payment processor, and details like that aren’t something you talk openly about freely.
Also, you will have sites that u lock will break beyond repair, so try is the correct word. I know this well from using Brave, which is even less than uBlock does, and even then some sites are still broken and requires the shields turned off. Just an unfortunate reality with today’s web.
In a long time I didn’t experience ublock breaking websites. I never turn it off.
Actually this is the developer’s goal with ublock, and it’s default blocklists, that it shouldn’t break websites. And when a website does brake, a fix is made very quickly.I don’t know how brave’s solution works, but ublock allows blocklists to patch websites besides blocking resources or requests.
There are multiple different ways, but there’s one allowing a script to load, but stop it’s execution if it reads/sets a variable or calls a function, another to fake the value of a variable or function call, and more. I think it allows patching network traffic too (request params, headers, body), not just js code
It’s certainly not out of their control and Stetson at System 76 confirmed that they choose Google as a business partner regarding the website. There are plenty of websites and online shopping services not using tracking scripts to monetize their customers data. Yes, most do, but most people also don’t use Linux as their desktop operating system or care much about privacy. Regarding not finding “any site”, Here are 2, I know off the top of my head. System 76 could also easily switch to hCaptcha (privacy preserving service) over reCAPTCHA as Discord previously did. If Discord is making better choices than System 76 regarding privacy respecting web services I think it speaks volumes about System 76’s claim to “take user privacy extremely seriously.”
I’ve made purchases on both of these websites without being tracked by a third-party advertising company.
adafruit is using cloudflare and it automatically loads stuff from paypal, amazon and cloudfront. it will also ship your stuff using dhl, ups etc.
would you say that you trust all of those companies with your (meta)data? if yes, reCAPTCHA won’t make a difference. although i do agree that everyone should use hCaptcha
Quite frankly no one should be using captchas at all. They are mostly pointless, and AI’s have reached the point of being able to solve them. It’s mostly just a gratis thing at this point… The illusion of trust and safety, probably for both users and providers.
Considering Purism is running a pump and dump scam with their phone, I wouldn’t grace them or their website with a single cent. There are worse things than a potential privacy issue…
Their focus is i think in making pop os for hardware from clevo or someone similar or themselves in case of desktops not making websites. I mean i agree that this suck because this websites represents them. I am just saying that maybe they dont even have its own web developers for the site and the company that handles their eshop probably dont offer alternative capcha method and for them to change that they need to change the conpany that handles eshop or make their own. Both are very complicated and expensive solutions i think.
You see, even Mozilla uses reCaptcha and other Google APIs. Companies that “fight for freedom” will only do the minimal. Still, I think is worthy to send an email do System 76 with this reclamation.
You’re worried about Google trackers on their website but you were gonna potentially buy a Lenovo Thinkpad? Lololol
I wasn’t very impressed with their customer service. They wouldn’t sell me a new battery when mine died. Now I’m stuck with an otherwise perfectly good laptop that now has to be plugged in all the time.
This is why I bought framework this time around. Hopefully they exist 5-10 years down the line.
I’m rather tempted to get a Framework 16, although I’m still waiting for more information about it to be released.
I just wish they would come out with a different keyboard. I don’t like the small arrow keys and the lack of dedicated home and end keys.
I got a battery from them without a problem last year. Have you tried recently?
I tried 2 years ago and they said the batteries for it were not available anymore.
buys another used Thinkpad on eBay
If it ain’t broke…
Ah yes, I’m sure there are no trackers on eBay.
I’m sure it doesn’t really matter, either but we aren’t arguing that, so…
