mxdcodes

you could only expose a webhook which is deployed public and then forward the locations from the webhook to the dawarich instance via wireguard or just use a vpn also on the client

🙋

I use it to track travel times for work and sometimes create maps of trips. Also I personally just like to see oh I was there a few days/weeks/years ago which brings up memories

Owntracks can do that but it has a limit of how much locations can be stored locally. I think it was 100k, so depending on your tracking interval during the month you may hit the limit. Also it still tries to sync every few minutes even though the server is down. Colota (https://github.com/dietrichmax/colota) supports the same without a limit and you can use it in a offline mode and then export e.g. a geojson and import it into Dawarich or you set it to only sync it on a imaginary SSID like "abc " and then change it to the correct one when you actually want to sync. So it never even tries to sync until you really want it to. Disclosure: I'm the dev of Colota.

Thank you, really appreciate it! Glad to hear Colota is working well with Dawarich for you so far. Feedback and criticism are always welcome. Most of it has led to real improvements in the app. I think a casual forum thread is probably just not the best setting for deep technical discussions, where context shifts quickly, everyone has a different background and nuance gets lost.

Thanks for the kind words! Vehicle/trip categories (car, bike, train, walk) + per-vehicle tracking is a great idea and fits well with the profile concept. Personally, I also want to skip other (activity) tracking apps which is the reason I also would love to have these features. Added the feature requests to the backlog. Thanks for taking your time trying out the app and giving feedback!

I never shifted anything. I was talking about encrypted backups on a server. These can be encrypted locally before being synced to a server.

You entered a thread explicitly about E2E encryption started by ShortN0te and introduced "single-party encryption" or which later turned out to mean encrypted backups.

Nope, you literally just made that up. I didn’t say that and I don’t even know what that means.
"I would prefer single-party encryption vs. integration, personally. Could make it optional."

You wrote 'I would prefer single-party encryption vs. integration, personally' in this exact thread. That's not something I made up.

…but it is.

I'd genuinely like to understand how.

My suggestion was that it could be…

This app has a specific purpose. It could have a encrypted backup feature but it won't change it's fundamental purpose which is viewing the location history.

You already have local backups that could be encrypted and then synced to a general storage server.

The exported files are not designed as backups (even though they are being used as ones by existing users). They're meant to be workable in other tools like QGIS, Strava or Komoot. Encrypting them would break that entirely.

I said literally nothing about your implementation. You’re imagining things. Please read more attentively

Fair point. I misinterpreted that. No need to get personal.

New day, new answer!

You started this conversation in a thread about E2E encryption and I responded in that context. Halfway through you shifted to encrypted local backups which you first called 'single-party encryption' and that's a completely different thing. If that had been your original point we could have skipped this entire exchange. It's a good idea which I already mentioned in the answer you replied to but you seem to have missed.

To clarify two things: I never said it was impossible. I said it wasn't realistic in the context of the selfhosted backends we were discussing. Those are different statements. And yes, lots of apps do encrypted backups because they are backup apps. Colota isn't. The existing export is for tools like QGIS or selfhosted backends and encrypting that data would break that use case entirely.

Encrypted import/export for backup is a separate feature that doesn't exist yet, so there's nothing here that's badly implemented. It simply isn't implemented at all.

By default this applications allows when adding a server, that the communication is not encrypted between the app and the server. This should be configured by default to enforce TLS encryption.

That's not true. For public endpoints, HTTPS is enforced. You can't use HTTP. For private IPs, yes HTTP is allowed. So "by default... not encrypted" is not correct and misleading.

That's an interesting reading of what I said, but not what I said. I didn't write that security doesn't matter because the server is off. I wrote that when nothing leaves the device by default, there is no attack surface to secure. That is the definition of secure by default.

Secure by default means the default configuration is safe. By default, Colota stores location data locally and exposes none of it. If you believe that somehow fails the secure-by-default standard, I'd genuinely like to understand how.

If your actual concern is what happens once a user configures a server, that's a fair discussion but it's a different one. I already addressed that above and I'd be curious to hear a specific objection to that setup rather than a general claim that it's insecure. Server compromise risk is inherent to every self-hosted service. That's not a Colota flaw, that's the model. And "users shouldn't have to manage their own infrastructure" is a philosophical position, not a vulnerability. One that doesn't really fit a tool explicitly built for people who want exactly that control.

So, where’s your VPS? In EU?

It's a VPS hosted by netcup in germany (https://maps.mxd.codes/)

Which refers to a Home Assistant template that doesn’t exist on the app?

Yes, you are right. I have to update the docs there. I removed the HA template because it basically just added the tid which I think is quite easy to add manually.