Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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"[GNU/]Linux being secure is a common misconception in the security and privacy realm." (mastodon.social)

submitted 1 year ago by jlou@mastodon.social to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

22 comments fedilink hide all child comments

"[GNU/]Linux being secure is a common misconception in the security and privacy realm."

https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/linux.html

"[GNU/]Linux is thought to be secure primarily because of its source model, popular usage in servers, small userbase and confusion about its security features. This article is intended to debunk these misunderstandings".

Based on this, one should try to do as much as possible on a GrapheneOS device

@privacy

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[–] wreckage@lemmy.world 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (8 children)

First thing I read and it's not even true.

Flatpak's permissions are also far too broad to be meaningful. For example, many applications come with the filesystem=home or filesystem=host permissions, which grant read-write access to the user's home directory

You can absolutely have more narrow permissions

For example, by default, Firefox only has read/write access to xdg-download and mpv only has read access to host and write access to xdg-pictures (to save screenshots). Discord by default only has read access to xdg-videos and xdg-pictures and write access to xdg-download.

I'm not even going to waste time reading the rest...

[–] tyftler@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yes, you can have more narrow permissions, and the examples you listed are all valid and examples of apps with sensible permissions.

But since app developers can choose their apps permissions on their own, many apps have broad permissions like the access to the entire filesystem.

Some examples listed in the post:

GIMP, Gedit, VLC, Libreoffice, Audacity, VSCode, Dropbox and Skype

All of these have either the filesystem=home or filesystem=host permission, giving the app acess to basically everything and compromising security.

Flatpaks can have more narrow permissions but aren't required to have narrow permissions. The post's statement that many applications have broad permissions remains true.

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