Saw this today and now I'm reconsidering if Boost is right for me. I'm really hoping this is shitty boiler plate that was accidentally copied and over looked because that is some bullshit to say "unless we decide we want to use your personal data for whatever we want".
I know "legitimate interest" is a phrase from the cookies law but there is no legitimate interest justification for this. My data is my data and I decide who has a legitimate interest in it so advertisers can fuck off, as can Boost if this the direction it's going.
Edit to say this blew up. I didn't realise I was kicking as big a hornet's nest and haven't read all the comments yet.
To be clear, what I don't like about this and other provisions in the terms is the language and implications around data use. I've no problem with ads being shown - I want developers to get paid for the work they do and that makes it possible for users to have "free" access to software if they can't afford to purchase.
I also want to add the response from Boost's dev below to make sure it's visible. You'll see that it is boilerplate but required by Google and was present in Boost for reddit. I just hadn't seen it because I purchased it immediately based on a recommendation. It doesn't make me happy about it but does remove some doubts I was having about the direction Boost is heading.
I will be purchasing the app to support the dev because I do like Boost but I understand not everyone can afford everything so you'll see some other suggestions in the comments below that don't have any ads if you're not happy with the free version and ads with their associated loss of data privacy.
Dev here.
The dialog and its content is not created by me, it is a standard solution from Google to comply with GDPR and other laws. More info here: https://support.google.com/admob/answer/10114014?hl=en
The consent dialog is also required by Google AdMob to show ads, and it is shown when the ad network is initialized.
When the app launches, first it checks for the remove ads purchase, and if it is not present, it will initialize the ads sdk. The ad network is not initialized if the remove ads purchase is detected.
Boost for Reddit was using the very same ad networks and consent dialog.
Some people on here will never realize that only paid devs putting in full days will make a platform like Lemmy grow to even a fourth of what Reddit is right now. Part time, unpaid devs will never grow this platform to that size and one way or another, those devs will want to be able to support themselves and that is either through donations or somekind of monetization, which may or may not include monetizing user data. It's just honest facts that it costs money to run servers and that money has to come from somewhere. It takes time to develop an app and in the case of Sync (probably Boost as well) it's just one dev and that takes a lot of his time. Nobody would do that amount of work for free.
I agree as per the general idea (Lemmy needs donations and financial support) but that's only for the server infrastructure which has non neglibible (and quite high indeed) storage and computational costs due to running a federated instance. A sheer client which does nothing except showing data from a backend and runs on the user's battery and device (with no cost of ownership on the developer), on the other hand, does not require money and should be free. Free as in freedom and free as in beer.