I am disappointed to find that the Clozemaster Android app tries to send roughly one hundred tracking messages every week to Amplitude and Google Firebase Analytics. I know this because my phone runs a ‘de-googled’ Android fork called Murena, and the operating system keeps a record of how many trackers each app wants to send and where it wants to send them. And usefully, it blocks all of them.
Why does Clozemaster spy on me? I am a paying customer, I don’t get anything for free. I don’t see how you can justify this behaviour.
Thanks for the post! Those requests are product analytics and crash reporting, not surveillance, and you’re welcome to keep blocking them. Nothing in the app depends on them.
Firebase and Amplitude are the two services we use to understand how the app is used and when it breaks. Events fire on things like “started a round,” “completed a round,” “changed a setting,” or “crashed on screen X.” Around a hundred a week for someone who plays daily sounds about right: a handful per session, each a tiny payload. (Blocked SDKs also retry, so the counter you’re seeing likely over-reports.) What we see on our end is aggregate: how many people use a given mode, whether a new feature gets used at all, which Android versions are crashing.
Why do it for paying customers? Because it’s how we decide what to build and fix. For example, someone reports that reviews feel broken since an update, analytics is how we learn whether that’s ten users or ten thousand, and on which devices. Similarly we also use it to see if anyone uses a new feature, if it could use improvements, etc. Without it we’d be guessing. We try talking with users as much as we can, but usage data is helpful too.
To be fair, many apps use Google Analytics. I’m working on de-googling as well and I rarely use apps.
What Google does is heinous, IMHO. From the article:
“From the In the original complaint filed in July 2020, the plaintiffs said that Google “intercepts, tracks, collects and sells consumer mobile app browsing history and activity data regardless of what safeguards or ‘privacy settings’ consumers undertake to protect their privacy.”
They further allege that this is true even if you don’t use Google-branded apps or devices, as “Google still tracks and compiles their communications by covertly integrating Google’s tracking software into the products of other companies.””
On this website grading collection practices, Google gets an F and Apple gets an A:
A lot of people have accepted that their data is the price of Google’s “free” services. I’m degoogling and use Apple products and a VPN. I’m reading about the AI crisis that may happen in 6-12 months. So I’m not sure we can avoid it anyway. As the Kipling article says;
“In either case, the plaintiffs’ argument about the difficulty of avoiding being tracked by the service still holds. “Other than staying off the internet entirely, there is no effective way for consumers to avoid Google Analytics and its surreptitious tracking.””
Well, here is a summary of what Amplitude does. It does not look like an innocent statistic provider to me.
“Amplitude Analytics is a digital analytics platform designed to provide detailed insights into user behavior across web, mobile, and other digital platforms. Unlike traditional analytics tools that focus on vanity metrics, Amplitude digs deeper into the user journey, helping businesses identify which features resonate with customers, where users drop off, and what drives engagement.”
That description is accurate, and that’s what I was describing, just written by Amplitude’s marketing team.
If the “across web, mobile, and other digital platforms” is the part you’re concerned with, that just means it’s possible to send them events from those sources, so for example we send events from the web app and mobile app. Not that the data is shared across other third party services.
“helping businesses identify which features resonate with customers, where users drop off, and what drives engagement” - this part is what I meant about trying to figure out what features we should keep, improve, etc.
We’d still want some kind of event tracking to figure out what features we should keep, improve, etc., whether we used Amplitude or not. Amplitude saves us time by providing data analysis, graphs, etc. vs us having to build it all ourselves.
Blocking is totally fine like I mentioned, and won’t affect your experience with the app. You can also go into Account > Privacy to change what’s sent.
@corgwin24 - agreed, we no longer use Google Analytics on the website. In the app, the Firebase SDK does include Google’s analytics component, but we only use it for Crashlytics (crash reports) and for testing whether a change actually helps before rolling it out to everyone.
Those who care deeply about privacy, such kirkeby and myself have to take extra steps. A lot of people don’t care much about privacy. They would rather pay less for products and let others have their data. Among my friends, most don’t care. We will see how much it matters. Good to know you don’t use Google Analytics, thank you for that.
People need to make money somehow. I don’t want to make the internet worse by making it not profitable. Google has made a lot of money selling people’s data. It is a little unsettling that I don’t know what information is in that file. They have had access to my email messages for decades and that is a lot of information. Whatever. I don’t put personal information in emails, but that was never a good practice anyway.
TLDR, I don’t have a problem with what you are doing, Mike. I also don’t have a problem with kirkeby asking you about it. Thanks for what you do and thanks for making such a great product for learning another language.
I think the main reason I get so upset by being tracked is that it is done secretly, and I would even say deceptively. There is zero transparency. Clozemaster sends my data to Google and Amplitude, and the only reason I know about it is because I use a phone with a rare operating system. The Norwegian Weather Service also sends my data to Google. That is not okay.
In the App Store for Apple, Clozemaster discloses that data and analytics are collected, including crash data and performance data (among other data). Again, that is why I choose not to use apps. (Apple gives you some control over what data is shared.)
The Google play store has a big section on what the data they collect. They have been sued regarding internet privacy and hopefully they are cleaning up their act.
To say that it is done secretly is not exactly fair. There is transparency in this case, it is disclosed by both Apple and Google.
I do see some places where the Clozemaster app has been made available for download but not by Clozemaster. In that case, you might not get the disclosures because it is an unofficial source.
“Your data is controlled by us in France (Deezer SA, 24 rue de Calais 75009 Paris), and may be shared with service providers and partners around the world.
Some of these recipients may be located in countries other than the one you are in, and these countries may not guarantee a level of personal data protection equivalent to that of your country. In such cases, we take all necessary measures to ensure that these recipients provide appropriate safeguards, such as the execution of standard data protection clauses and the implementation of adequate security measures.“
So that is pretty awful and why I wouldn’t actually pay them to do anything for me. I’m not convinced that they have authority over these other people to do anything. Are they sending auditors? I doubt it.
I don’t know who they are sending your data to, but it sounds like it is anybody they want to.
My phone tells me Deezer is trying to send trackers to 1) Adjust, 2) Google Analytics, 3) Google Firebase Analytics, and 4) Segment even though the app has no special permissions (neither does Clozemaster). So how am I as a user supposed to know what they track and store about me? I just think it is wrong.
It is in the disclosures. I don’t much like it either. But I don’t use apps if I don’t have to. I like the Waze App. Once in a while I need it, then I delete it when I’m done. Does that help? Who knows.