If I understand correctly, this is to test the Internet connection; I get what you’re going for with that, but that’s just shifting the privacy issue from Google to Murena.
A privacy-focused OS should not be doing things like that without a clear way to either turn it off or change the test URL to one the user chooses.
I switched to /e/os because it offers the ability to run my own local backend cloud server. Maybe the URL for this check could be gotten from the phone’s cloud settings, so if you’re on a private cloud backend the test would be done against the private cloud server?
Turning this off would result in the permanent display that you have no internet connection, and Apps relying on this connectivity check (instead of checking for themselves or just trying to connect regardless) would refuse to work out of the belief there’s no internet connection. I would assume you’ve seen the user complaints about this caused by the unavailable server.
Yeah, I saw that there was a way to change the URLs it uses; I kinda don’t think that installing a third-party app and using adb to enable it absolves Murena on this. I already have a browser tab open to those instructions to deal with later.
My point was that this is bad privacy design and should really be fixed. It doesn’t look good to say that Google’s privacy practice suxx0rs and you should use /e/os instead, then to have hidden calls to Murena’s servers happening, you know?
Especially when doing better can be just a matter of adding a new setting.
Now, I think it’s unlikely that Murena is doing anything with that data, whereas it’s almost certain that Google would be, but demanding to be trusted is not particularly trustworthy behavior.
(I’d have opened a bug report instead of a forum post, but I still can’t create an account on the gitlab.)
