Request creation of free software missing from the 🄯ommons 🗽🐧🐃

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This is a place to ask whether free open source software exists for a particular purpose. If it’s non-existent, specify your software requirements here so your dream can be well articulated for everyone to either laugh at or share the dream and give moral support for you to create it yourself. Or you might even to pitch the idea so well that a developer loves the idea enough to run off and build it for you.

No other community exists for this purpose but there are some loosely related ones. If existing software closely delivers what you need but is missing a feature, you might post a wishlist/feature request here or in !bugs@sopuli.xyz.

The FSF has a software directory that can help with finding software.

Loosely related decentralised communities generally for FOSS:

There is also foss@beehaw.org but I don’t recommend it because the mod is trigger happy with censorship. E.g. if you post about FOSS advocacy it will get removed as it does not relate to any particular FOSS application. There are also many more FOSS forums duplicated in centralised places which are not conducive to the digital rights spirit of free open source software, so they are omitted.

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🤖🕵→🏦 AI bot needed to harvest the privacy policies, app permissions, and Tor-hostility of all banks in a given country and rank them (🎓 good student project) (lemmy.sdf.org)

submitted 3 months ago by evenwicht@lemmy.sdf.org to c/foss_requests@libretechni.ca

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Banks are on an unstoppable uncontrolled trajectory in pursuit of KYC over-achievement. That is, they over-collect far more data on people than legally required (before it gets leaked to criminals in data breaches). Banks’ privacy policies are rife with anti-consumer weasel words.

It’s such a shit-show that privacy proponents have no real choice other than to quit banks and operate entirely with cash. Not many people have that level of discipline.

Software can turn this situation around. For example, there are ~6000 privacy-abusing banks and credit unions in the US. If a robot harvests all the privacy policies, fetches AOS apps to check permission reqs, records those with websites MitMd by Cloudflare, and uses all that info to find the lesser of evils, consumers can participate in creating a competition for privacy (as opposed to a competition of meaningless soul-selling fractions of a percent of interest earnings). The heart of the problem is banks are only getting pressure from the side of oppressors and tyranny and no pressure from the side of the people they purport to serve. Software and data can remedy this.

Worth noting that long before the AI bubble started, a university in the US studied bank privacy policies in bulk using a scraper bot that just looked at the standardised privacy disclosure forms for which all banks must conform to a standard layout. The data has rotted by now so their research is not of much use.

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