Syncthing not privacy friendly

I want to reopen an old post ("To protect your privacy, choose another folder") becouse I have the same issue.

I googoled the error message but other apps are capable of read and write the root folder of my SD or my internal storage of an andrid device. Why Syncthing can’t ? I’ve read all the General Data Protection Regulation “GDPR” (Regulation (EU) 2016/679)and I was not able to find nothing about the right to let my apps to access my OWN smartphones storage root. I think that this bug is violating article 15 (right to access) and indirectly to other articles because I can’t use my own local network to backup my device but I am forced to use an extraEU service provider (Google) that… works out of the box…

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Please keep in mind that it’s not Syncthing that blocks selecting those paths on purpose but rather Android that doesn’t allow applications to access them, at least by default. There may be some workarounds, which those other apps utilise, but nothing similar has been coded into the Syncthing app. This has nothing to do with privacy laws or anything like that :sweat_smile:.

Please also note that the official Android app is discontinued, so no new functionality or any other fixes are going to be added to it anyway. If you use Syncthing-Fork though, then the workaround from https://forum.syncthing.net/t/to-protect-your-privacy-choose-another-folder/18099/3 is probably still applicable.

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Workaround, if Android restricts its own folder chooser:

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