Privacy and data collection

#1

Hello!

I’ve installed Motion Box and been testing it for a while now and I have to say its a reaaaly awesome project, works also very smoothly, without adds and without putting you into a search bubble! I love it.

Now my question is what data (and metadata) are you collecting about the user, how permanently is it collected and do you forward this data to any 3rd party? Also what is your plan about this things for the future?

If this is already explained somewhere, can you redirect me to a link?

Thanks and keep up the good work :smiley:

#2

Greetings @oiuztfgh (interesting nickname),

MotionBox doesn’t track anything about you. And I don’t plan to do anything like that in the future because it would go against my principle of serving the end user at all time.

The best part is you don’t have to trust me on this and you can check Sky kit / MotionBox source code directly.

#3

Super awesome, thank you for the answer!

#4

I second the positive feedback. However, I have another question concerning the privacy issue. What information about device information, IP address, screen resolution etc. of the users does MotionBox send to the platforms such as DuckDuckGo/YouTube and others in order to get the videos?

I guess the question is whether those third parties can still identify users based on the information they receive using fingerprinting methods?

Thank you for your hard work and your time!

#5

Greetings @Strantie,

The VBML engine entirely uses GET requests, and parses the public content it retrieves. So I guess they certainly have your IP and know what videos you are accessing. But that’s about it, keep in mind I’m only accessing what’s required so I’m not loading resources like images or anything alike.

For some backend(s) I need some basic cookies support to retrieve the proper data (OpenSubtitles). But all these are cleared each time you close the application.

What’s funny is that initially I wanted to support POST requests for the user to authentify and retrieve its videos on a given platform. That was before I realized the huge data collection that happens on these platform and the bubble they put you into based on these. So what happened to be something I felt was lacking in MotionBox (and Monkey) turns out to be quite a good feature. Avoid data collection, tracking and content bubbles.

If you are going to use a program to show Internet videos to your kids you should totally use something like MotionBox, you’ll get total control and avoid every intrusive content. That’s a benefit of having a tool that serves your best interests at all time. And please don’t just take my word about this and feel free to check the code :).