Apple’s PR is better. With Microsoft all news titles were like “OMG Windows will take screenshots of all you do and send it to AI”, and with Apple it’s more like “Apple is carefully adding AI to their products, respecting user privacy as they always have been”.
Of course, when one looks into technical details they would find that MS Recall is strictly local and runs only on special hardware that people don’t even have yet.
Apple Intelligence does send your data to cloud and scans everything you have in Apple ecosystem, not just screenshots. Of course they say it’s done in very privacy respecting ways, and provide a lot of technical information to back this claim. But at the end it’s closed source and is subject to change at any time.
Having said that, Apple users are used to and value that Apple magically takes care of everything, so they are happy to pay premium for Apple’s products whatever the company does.
Lots of good advice here, but many might be too extreme. I find such all-or-nothing approach intimidating for people who just started to think about improving their privacy situation.
Let’s see… you are angry about bloatware. It can come from two sources - mobile service carrier and phone manufacturer. How to get rid of it?
- Buy only “unlocked” phones. Then the carrier will not be able to push anything to your phone. You will also be free to change the carrier as you wish.
- Buy phones from manufacturers that don’t install too much bloatware. Google Pixel has only Google apps, Motorola also is almost vanilla Google. Fairphone is more exotic, but an interesting option. iPhone is OK too if you want Apple ecosystem, but customization is not a thing there.
Now, we are in a privacy focused community and I saw your later comments about Google being an opposite of privacy. I would argue that vanilla Pixel is much better than bloated and locked Samsung already. I see you get recommendations to replace the OS that your new phone might run, and these are valid, but come with significant downsides. There are other ways to improve your privacy stance by changing the way how you use your phone without changing what phone or what OS you run on it.
I’m using pi-hole + uBlock origin.
Adblock DNS, Pi-Hole, hBlock - these three do essentially same thing but at different layers - blocking DNS requests based on blacklists. I’m not familiar with hBlock, but I assume blacklists on each of these 3 are very similar. Using all three doesn’t slow down your internet connection much, unless your pihole server is underpowered. You can drop pi-hole from the mix if you are not using it’s other features (statistics, local DNS, etc). hBlock looks nice, and should add zero latency, but works only for local machine. So you still need network-wide blocker. Make sure you set your DNS on router, so all devices would get protection.
uBlock Origin is smarter than simple DNS blocking, but protects only your browser sessions.
I don’t trust Proton enough to use it exclusively. Personally I use their free email tier as a secondary mailbox.
- They are not fully open source (I found only web client source code)
- Their last independent audit was in 2021 and was done for beta version of their email
- The audit itself was for security, nothing related to privacy
- They advertise their email service as encrypted: encrypted:
End-to-end encryption Proton Mail is a private email service that uses open source, independently audited end-to-end encryption and zero-access encryption to secure your communications. This protects against data breaches and ensures no one (not even Proton) can access your inbox. Only you can read your messages.
Which I see as deceptive: end-to-end encryption is working without user involvement only for emails between Proton mailboxes. In other cases user needs to establish PGP encryption on their own. Inbox may be not accessible by Proton (we actually have no clue because server side code is closed source), but unencrypted incoming messages can be easily intercepted by Proton relays.
I’m not saying that Proton does all this nefarious stuff, but their marketing is questionable.
This looks interesting. But the only pre-built hardware option they have on the list, Nano G1 Explorer, is way too big for a little kid. But I may get it for adult family members for emergency situations.
- @pound_heap@lemm.ee to
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I see that some folks here suggest that a change in how taxes are reported is a solution to this.
For me it sounds weird. The problem is with having big tech trackers deployed on most web sites by site owners who don’t care about privacy implications. It doesn’t look like tax prep firms are profiting from user data, it’s just their negligence.
I hope that they will do a good thing and replace these invasive trackers with something better.
But meanwhile, people can use their desktop software. I’ve seen H&R block software a few years back - it was slightly buggy, but it worked. I don’t think they put Meta trackers there.
I’m not zealous about it… I’m selling my privacy for 1.5% cashback to banks and for 5% to Amazon! However, I’m consolidating my banking to fewer banks than earlier. And I stopped using services that aggregate financial accounts to provide insights - budgeting, projections, investment advice, etc.
On the other hand I use Privacy.com for smaller vendors, but more often for security reasons than privacy. Monero for some services, like VPN.
Also, no real name or address in store loyalty programs.
Well, my question was specifically about DNS. I don’t think that the sites or services you use have any way to know what DNS are you using.
ISP can capture DNS traffic, but this is where threat model comes into play… Like if you are concerned about some entity to collect you profile based on data from ISP which includes both your DNS queries and your IP
I guess there is a chance to see some of code, but I doubt about it being properly open sourced.
Source: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/