The mistake I made in this humanitarian crisis situation was to use Blynk to build a public service app to help others.
I will not make that mistake again.
In addition, I also read the Blynk privacy policy and according to their privacy policy, they can provide the data we use on the Blynk network to third parties, for example Google and FB-like behavioral analytics, where they can partner with data miners and other third parties and user our "behavioral exhaust" without our express written consent.
From
Blynk Terms of Use (TOS) policy:
Quote:
By using the [Blynk] Service, you are granting us (and any service providers or Providers used by us) permission to access your account and those messages, data, information, text, graphics, audio, video or other material and content of any kind posted/uploaded/transmitted to or through the Service using your account, to process and submit said material to End Users.
That is a very "radical" TOS statement, to say the least.......
Update:
After looking into this, I found some promising iPhone apps which do not share your data with third parties (in contrast to Blynk) and will test the
mosquitto broker to set up a private pub/sub network to send and receive messages to and from these ESP8266 and ESP32 devices.
Quote:
Eclipse Mosquitto is an open source (EPL/EDL licensed) message broker that implements the MQTT protocol versions 5.0, 3.1.1 and 3.1. Mosquitto is lightweight and is suitable for use on all devices from low power single board computers to full servers.
The MQTT protocol provides a lightweight method of carrying out messaging using a publish/subscribe model. This makes it suitable for Internet of Things messaging such as with low power sensors or mobile devices such as phones, embedded computers or microcontrollers.
The Mosquitto project also provides a C library for implementing MQTT clients, and the very popular mosquitto_pub and mosquitto_sub command line MQTT clients.
I have already set up a mosquitto broker on Ubuntu, the basic security authentication and can send a message from my ESP32 device to the remote Linux server. Will discuss this in another post.