Is leaving the email as a required field for registration against FOSS philosophy by any means? even if it won’t be used for anything other than user verification/notifications if agreed by the user?
No. You’re probably confusing FOSS and privacy.
yeah, that makes sense, could be
Let me add to this: I’d say if the requirement is to have an account with a proprietary walled garden like Facebook or Twitter, then yes it would be against of FOSS philosophy (separately of privacy concerns).
The difference being: e-mail is a pretty standard service, there are plenty of providers (from Big Tech to the Tutanotas of this world), and you can even run your own e-mail server if you want (I happen to do just that). So, you are not forced to use a particular proprietary platform.
that’s a fair point. Just what I was wondering, thanks!
If you are concerned about the privacy of it all, you can use services like SimpleLogin and AnonAddy, which give you garbage emails. So you don’t really give much information with an email.
And if you can selfhost it it’s a whole other level.
Not really. If you selfhost, all the emails you create share the same domain, which can easily be used to identify you if you’re the only one using it. Theses services have the advantage of letting you blend in the crowd.
i guess you could self host and let other people use it, like what gmail did
You’re going to have a hard time getting a crowd as large as SimpleLogin’s
I don’t remember the details right now but you can do email verification without the need to store the email address in your db, with a hash in the activation link.
good call! I’ll look into this, I’m starting an elixir project and there’s no updated for captchas except reCaptcha support, I’ll see if I can find a secure way to handle this.
What is the FOSS philosophy? Whether something is FOSS is a statement only about its source code, the data it collects is a separate issue.
Aren’t you talking about Open Source? the Free Software movement has many beliefs, a few of them are in this community’s description
I’m talking about free software, as defined by the fsf. A software is free if it comes with its source code and a license that gives some rights about this source code. Doesn’t matter what horrible features your software has, it is free as long as one can edit them out and distribute their edited version. I am not aware of a definition of free software that includes requirements on the software’s features (like collecting email addresses), maybe you can link to one?
Note that this community’s description is about free culture in general, which is broader than free software. You probably meant that rather than FOSS. Sorry if it seems like I am playing with word, it’s just that I first commented as a response to your question without paying attention to the community.
Now I am not sure about how much it changes my previous answer. If you run an online service, it is probably legitimate to ask for a way to contact your users, as long as you only use it for what they gave you their consent for. If the underlying software is free, people who don’t want to give you that information can still run their own instance of your service. Creating a free software doesn’t come with the duty of maintaining servers that run it, so you are free to impose whatever condition on the ones you run.
Awesome, that really helps me. Thanks!
If they dont log data, it is not.
