If you don't know me, I make frequent write ups about privacy and security. I've covered some controversial topics in the past, such as whether or not Chromium is more secure than Firefox. Well, I will try my hand again at taking a look at some controversial topics.
I need ideas, though. So far, I would like to cover the controversy about Brave, controversy around Monero and other cryptocurrencies, and controversy around AI. These will be far easier to research and manage than Chromium vs. Firefox, for example. I'd like to know which ideas you have!
Which controversial privacy topics do you know of that you would like to see covered?
PLEASE DO NOT ARGUE ABOUT THEM IN THE COMMENTS!
Please save any debate for if/when I make a write up about the topic. Keep the comments clean, and simply upvote ideas you would like to see covered. I won't be able to cover everything, so it helps bring attention!
Above all else, be kind, even if you don't agree with an idea or topic :)
Step 1 of installing GrapheneOS for de-googling your life: Buy a Google Pixel phone
Look - I know, I know. I get it. Google allows you to unlock the bootloader while maintaining the phone's unique and excellent hardware security features. The argument makes sense. It is compelling. Other manufacturers do not give you this freedom. I am not arguing about that. I have a Pixel phone running GrapheneOS myself.
However... It is just so very obviously ironic that one needs to trust Google's hardware and purchase a Google product to de-google their life through GrapheneOS. I think that it is a perfectly valid position for someone to raise their eyebrows, laugh, and remain skeptical of the concept either because they do not want to support Google at all, or because they simply will not trust Google's hardware.
The reason why I think that this is "controversial" is because I have seen multiple instances of someone pointing out the irony, followed by someone getting defensive about it and making use of the technical security arguments in an attempt to patch up the irony.
It's obvious to me the blackbox radio contains an inscrutable backdoor that negates all privacy aspects.
Yeah, there is a whole "separate OS", but, to my knowledge, there hasn't been evidence of it casually being able to collect arbitrary data from the actual phone's OS.
It has been made impossible to personally audit, the safe assumption, the null hypothesis is that it does until proven otherwise, which would be impossible and in any case implausible under our current surveillance capitalism.
There are multiple encryption layers and the private keys are not on the device. Even a governement agency would struggle auditing some random phone. They're not doing it, our security is not their concern. Also they don't want us knowing about their backdoors.
My issue with that is that Pixels are expensive, and in some places are not sold officially (meaning they can only be bought from smaller resellers with usually much less generous return policies). The newest models are outright unaffordable new. The only ones below $150 are either secondhand or out of support, so that's what poor people are left with? Plus, no headphone jack.
I use Graphene myself, but I dislike absolutism. I don't in the slightest regret buying my Pixel even though $300 is a painful sum to spend on a phone (and it was on the cheaper end if we're talking about up-to-date models!), but I know that my mother would never spend this much on a phone - so I look into Divest or Lineage on more common and affordable phones.
Bought a second hand Pixel 7 in like new condition at the time for $250 on back market (dropped it, bought another, still cheaper than the equivalent iPhone 14 lol). That at least means I am not financially contributing to Google, but I do agree that I don't think there is a way to verify that the hardware is completely foolproof even if its the best option we currently have.
I guess that's true of any hardware though, and we have to make our assumptions based off known quantities such as Pixels' unique hardware security features?
But yeah, it's a minefield out there. Let's get carrier pigeons.
Yeah... And probably all big players have somehow backdoored their phone :/.
This is entirely valid as a concern. In my matrix GC someone just said pixel and oneplus are best for modding and I was like.... The whole point of me trying to degoogle is to contribute less to their economy, why would I buy their bs hardware😭☠️
Matrix is defacto centralized around Matrix.org & servers they provide (where the cost of hosting makes it largely inaccessible to low-spec & medium-sized servers causing them to inevitably shut down & recommending users back to Matrix.org). All the metadata gets synced back to the mothership that was funded by Israeli intelligence. Avoid it.
Cloudflare is a CIA front. They offer “free” DDoS protection + static proxy thereby giving Cloudflare the ability to MitM all TLS connections thru their servers. They convinced so many ‘developers’ via ‘influencers’ that every tiny site needs Cloudflare in front of it as a precaution/optimization, but it is an entirely premature optimization that doesn’t need to so widely deployed, but it is. 🤔
Microsoft has always been an enemy but somehow managed to Trojan horse their way into the minds of developers again (neo-EEE) trying to centralize how software is created. Like we avoid Microsoft Windows, the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem should equally be avoided: Copilot, LinkedIn, Outlook, Exchange, Office, Teams, Azure, VSCode, npm, GitHub (Sponsors, Codespaces, Copilot). Literally none of these projects/services can’t be replaced to help protect the privacy of your clients, coworkers, contributors.
Cloudflare is a CIA front. They offer “free” DDoS protection + static proxy thereby giving Cloudflare the ability to MitM all TLS connections thru their servers.
I just started to learn about privacy in depth this year, and this little fact about Cloudflare has sat with me more than most things that I've learned. I feel like very few people think about the implications of Cloudflare's practices. Even if its not a CIA front (I feel like it is), we should feel uncomfortable giving any private entity such power. Unrelated, but their crazy lava-lamp wall, as cool as it is, kinda gives me bad vibes lol.
I learned about Cloudflare mitm quickly because when you use Tor browser you will see how many websites use cloudflare because you can't access all those sites. So I did a little research about this problem about cloudflare and found out how serious and huge problem it is.
Matrix originating in Israel made me decide not to use it. No way anything from that place isn't spyware.
Browsing with JS disabled by default and expecting most sites to have basic functionality like "display this text"
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Whether phones are listening or not
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What is the redacted part in the rationale to ban Tik Tok
A note on the latter, it is presented as national security threat. They won't say what it is. I presume because some of the shit they don't want a foreign power doing is sth they very much do themselves.
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There is no such thing as too many layers of obfuscation. At least until we abolish all empires, states, religions and corporations.
…when the last king is hanged on the entrails of the last priest.
Deceptive marketing and straight up lying is so prevalent that people have all sorts of wild ideas about VPNs. That’s why it’s high time someone cleared things up.
Its not private if it needs a phone number (cough SIGNAL cough)
"Its to protect the kids", "Its to fight terrorism"
That one
filthymuslim country banning VPN's with the guise of it being impermissible ("haram")Whether this guy should be forced to turn over his passwords or not:
https://www.theregister.com/2017/03/20/appeals_court_contempt_passwords/
The appeals court found that forcing the defendant to reveal passwords was not testimonial in this instance because the government already had a sense of what it would find.
Boy, I'm not a lawyer, but that sure feels like being forced to incriminate yourself.
Others take issue with the idea that technology might be allowed to trump legal process. In a 2015 California Law Review article arguing that forced decryption is necessary to balance individual rights and government power, Dan Terzian, presently an associate at Duane Morris LLP, argues that the EFF's view is too expansive.
"Scores of companies now encrypt their data," Terzian wrote. "In the EFF’s alternate universe, these companies are effectively immune from discovery and subpoenas."
Only if you consider corporations persons. They’re not.
Excellent suggestion, btw.
Well, real privacy don¡t exist in the same moment you goes online. Google controls half the internet and MS and Apple the rest, direct or indirect. Even the Dark web isn't so private as people think.
An advanced user can reduce the privacy holes, gutting Windows, leaving it in an OS as is, the same with Google products, but also only up to a certain limit so as not to turn navigation into pure text or get blocked in most the pages. For this reason, we must focus on which data deserves to be protected or hidden and which are of a purely technical aspect that ensure the proper functioning of the sites we visit.
I don't care that the page knows what country I live in, but if it has to be avoided that it knows my address, I don't care that it knows the OS I use and the exact resolution of my screen, since this helps the pages not to be out of order or download links take me to downloads for another OS.
This is all data that matches millions of other users and is not a privacy issue. These problems arise with data that identifies the user directly, such as email addresses, which are unique and perfectly traceable, personal photos published on the Internet, bank details in these very convenient mobile payment apps, posting on Fakebook until when are we going to go pee or when we go on a vacation trip (surely some of the 5637 followers are very interested when your house is empty)...
There is a lot that the user can do to have a certain privacy at the computer level, but the worst security hole is always the user themselves and the lack of common sense..
Go to Browserleaks and see how private you are
Yo can also take a look in Blacklight or Webbkoll to check what the pages you visit are looking for and who is looking over your shoulder. You can also look how well you bock ads and trackers with this one (mine 100% score)..
JavaScript canvas blocker add-ons (this one specifically comes to mind, because I've recently had to disable it since it makes life harder; is it worth the cost of admission, or is it a lot of effort for not a lot of reward?) Other types of privacy add-ons would be good to explore as well.
I installed such a plugin after reading about fingerprinting many years ago and have not ran into any problems yet. What issues have you encountered?
I didn't really keep a list, sorry, I just gave the add-on a test drive and several sites I visited didn't work.
Odd, maybe it's time to try again? I use CanvasBlocker, very apt name 😄
Just to be clear, I use Firefox.
You could also whitelist websites probably, so it works unless you explicitly tell it not to.
