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.

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.

Signal as a centralized meta-data honeypot.

There is no expectation of privacy in public.

By which I mean that things like blurring a house from Street View are unreasonable.

Browsing with JS disabled by default and expecting most sites to have basic functionality like "display this text"

F-Droid not being trusted. They build and sign a developer's code on their behalf, so there is a chance for injection there.

There are reproducible builds, but I would argue it's not taken seriously enough. Like right now nobody is publicly verifying Signal's supposed reproducible Android builds and they've historically had problems keeping it working.

Also how most (or all?) Play Store apps (including FOSS) contain proprietary code.

VPN: essential or snake oil?

Its not private if it needs a phone number (cough SIGNAL cough)

"Its to protect the kids", "Its to fight terrorism"

That one ~~filthy~~ muslim country banning VPN's with the guise of it being impermissible ("haram")

1. Whether phones are listening or not

2. 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.

I've got nothing to hide.

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.

For me an AI topic is the hottest

Browser extensions aren’t the answer to preventing tracking (as apps and other processes outside the browser aren’t blocked)

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..

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.

A global look at Short form video as the latest trend in mass misinformation campaigns, including which interest groups, or states conduct them and who they contract (from large scale to possibly unwitting small creators) to produce and post it. How it developed from prior trends, and where it might go next. Perhaps not particularly controversial (in the true sense of the word), but geopolitically worth looking at and discussing more in imo. Of course a privacy and security focus on this is very much integral to the issue by default. How the existing business models around the data involved (harvesting , auctioning etc) might play into this already , and in the years to come. As well as how other business is implicated. Good old “Follow the money” I guess .