As every year, we organize our General Assembly. On September 5th, we met in the region of Nantes, with a few remote members using BigBlueButton virtual meeting software to review the past year and decide on the orientations of the association.
This year has been very rich for Exodus Privacy. Our tools, whether it is the platform or the application, work well and are widely used: The Android application has been downloaded more than 100,000 times from the Google Play Store and at the time of writing this blog, the platform contains more than 146,000 analyses of 77,452 applications. This year, we introduced the ability to analyze applications from F-Droid and added trackers to our knowledge base, which now contains more than 300 of those. This is something to be proud of!
The goal of Exodus Privacy is to allow the greatest number of people to understand the issue of mobile phones tracking. For this purpose, several projects have been pursued by the association:
We have also been asked by the French Ministry of Education to deploy an internal analysis platform within the Ministry. This was a very large and rewarding project, but one that mobilized a lot of energy.
Energy is undoubtedly what has sinned in the association this year. Indeed, we were able to measure during this meeting an individual and collective voluntary exhaustion. As a reminder, Exodus Privacy is only made up of volunteers and currently has a small number of about ten active members. Beyond the observation, we established that the association had to understand and treat this problem urgently.
Our treasurer presented us with the financial balance sheet. For the moment, our finances are healthy, we have few operating expenses and so far we have found funding for our projects.
This result is possible thanks to our technical support Gandi and Octopuce as well as our donors. Many thanks to them.
We have established three lines of work for the coming year.
The first is volunteer burnout. We have decided to launch a work on this subject. A small group of members will have the mission to identify the reasons for this exhaustion and propose solutions while measuring their impact for the association, within three months.
The second concerns the continuation of projects to raise public awareness of tracking via smartphones: improvement of the application, educational kit…
Finally, the third aims to keep improving our public communication.
We have elected our new Bureau for the coming year:
Our general meetings always allow us to measure how precious the people around us are. We have a fabulous community and fabulous supporters, a big thank to all of you!