looking at the data safety tabs for K9mail and Thunderbird (in the play store), k9 collects no data at all, while TB seems to collect all sorts of things. Is this really in the interest of the user who intents to migrate ?
Any educated answer (no nonsense, no ”feelings”) would be very much appreciated.
It looks like we didn’t expand K-9 Mail to the same data categories when we set up the Thunderbird listing. We had legal review each of the boxes and took their recommendation on what to enable.
Turns out, an email client normally needs many of those boxes, due to the definitions of “collect” and “share”. This isn’t always what the user might consider collecting and sharing.
Under the hood we make no difference in data collection, both applications aim to collect and share a minimal amount of information, and are simply meant to send and receive email.
Some examples:
Files and docs, Photos and Videos, Audio - Do you want to attach something to an email? The app is “collecting” this information to attach it to the email. It is used for app functionality, and optional, so exactly what you would expect: We take the data you provide us, attach it to your email, and send it.
Personal information - An email address is considered personal information. We need to use this for sending email. We might also need your contacts to autocomplete your recipient.
Depending on interpretation you might also say we are “Sharing” your data with others. And with this I don’t mean advertisers. We take the email, and share it with a third party email server to…deliver the email.
If you expand each of the sections, you’ll see that basically everything is either “App functionality”, or “optional”, or both.
The extra category that is not “app functionality” you’ll see is crash logs, diagnostics, app interactions. We don’t currently receive telemetry past what the Play Console provides to every developer. We are considering to add this so we have some aggregate idea on how users use the product and what is working well, though this is not yet implemented, and will also be optional for both apps.
I’d encourage you to switch over to Thunderbird since there might be the one or other feature we don’t enable in K-9 now or in the future, but mostly it is just a choice of pink vs blue.