There’s a potential for abuse with paying for donations (not saying it should never be done):
risk of unsafe blood supplies if people lie about their health history in order to be able to sell their blood
ethical concerns around exploiting financially vulnerable people, and turning a life-saving act into another commercial transaction
In areas where those vulnerable people aren’t protected by the legal system, there’s also the potential of OTHER people “harvesting” and selling the blood
Voluntary and altruistic donations are best, and ideally those values are maintained all the way through the donation process. Hopefully technology continues to improve so that we can support those donations with synthesized alternatives
I believe we’ve had some discussion around this in Canada recently, specifically with donations for plasma. I’m not caught up on it to comment further about it
Yep, also the ads don’t get initialized at all if the user buys the ad-free version (going to top all in the Lemmy Boost community should bring up the post about it). It’s relatively cheap and the dev is very active with bugs and requests. The dev is developing for the Fediverse and I’m happy to support that (as well as devs for Sync, Connect, Lemmy, etc.)
I like Boost and paid for ad-Free, but a lot of other clients should work for your needs. While they might not be privacy focussed, many are open source so you can check what is going on.
My preference goes
Boost (not FOSS, one time payment to remove ads)
Connect (not FOSS, ad free)
Eternity (FOSS & ad free)
I uninstalled the other ones and haven’t kept up with them. There may be better ones out there, these are the ones I’m keeping up with
I’m not familiar with the companies mentioned, but have you tried talking to the doctor or the clinic? They may be able to provide you with better guidance, or tell you about other machines that are compatible with your treatment plan. Even if they don’t know about the privacy aspect, that might give you a shorter list to follow up on.
My guess (or hope) is that this is the option that the average person finds convenient, which is why the doctor recommended it. There should be other options that the doctor / clinic knows about, especially because an IOT CPAP machine is a fairly new thing.
Doctors modify treatment plans fairly often, even for things like patient comfort, and bringing this concern to their attention could also change what they recommend to future patients.
Personal thoughts unrelated to your case: This is a growing concern with healthcare technology and I think we need more attention on the harms. “Your insurance company will use it against you” is something that most people will understand.