It’s pretty common for companies like that to advertise that their app is 100% open source, but then stop short of guaranteeing anything beyond that. In PIA’s case, I would point out that their infrastructure (the servers that they use to route your traffic) are closed, so they could be doing literally anything in there. Their desktop client being open source doesn’t actually do much to guarantee your privacy.
Thanks for the insight! Yeah aware that Mullvad is pretty much the closest to “state-of-the-art” as it gets, compared to the rest of these services in the market.
Right, you can’t be 100% sure, but there are measures that they can take to make you trust them a bit more. For example, I believe Mullvad runs systems in RAM and keeps no records of who uses what. You don’t even have to give them your email address; they don’t want it. And they submit to regular audits (provided you trust the auditors).
Also, if the client matters, then don’t use their client. Use the OpenVPN client instead.
I made a PWA that can quickly remove tracking variables called Link Cleaner. If you install it through Chrome or another Chromium browser on Android, it shows up as a share target, so you can share links to Link Cleaner and then share again to the intended target.
Exactly. A website has to download ALL the HTML every time. Sure, it can put all that in a JavaScript file and cache it but it has to be built each time. With an app, you (the devs) get to choose what to load, and it’s just usually a few simple things each time instead of constantly running a script.
Using Lemmy as a web app really sucked. Having an actual app with actual integration to a robust UI works.
Plus as an app developer you get to go through the user's contacts and files. Having an actual app locks you and allows you to be the product the app owners sell. Nothing else and certainly nothing of value for 99% of the apps out there.
That is 100% wrong. Did you read the tweets or even look at a single YouTube URL?
youtube.com/watch?v=FOO&si=BAR would be shortened to just youtu.be/FOO?si=BAR
The link to other people’s account is in the &si=BAR part. Probably standing for “share ID” or “source ID”or something. The shortened link is just the same as the long one with watch?v=FOO being included in the URL instead of the parameters.
You can de-Google an Android phone with a custom ROM and have a phone that you have control over and know nobody is spying on you by running a firewall on the phone.
Actually, you can, with Lockdown for iOS or Lulu for macOS. There are other alternatives available, these are just a pair of FOSS examples. You can totally block *.apple.com if you really want to.
It’s not quite the same though. With a custom android ROM, you can be pretty confident that everything kernel-and-up is not spying on you. On iOS and macOS, you don’t have the same level of verifiability, as the OS could just circumvent any VPN/firewall you might have configured. They might pinky promise not to, but without running another external firewall it’s not really verifiable.
It said that Google put it in their aggregated report. Not that they disclosed it. There is a big difference between ‘we got 100 requests’ and ‘we got 10 requests for X info, 30 for Y info’.
ETA: I just looked at the data again, it’s broken in to categories like FISA NSL etc, then it just gives a range of requests 0-1000 etc.
Every years or so I try out a bunch of alternate keyboards. Then I go back to using Gboard. {sigh}
I’ve been using swipe typing for years and I just can’t get by without it. None of the privacy oriented keyboards do it well enough to really be usable yet.
Heads up, I had to remove this extension on my browser because some websites would get stuck in a redirect loop because it’d remove the tracking stuff it’d use in a redirect chain. Took me months to figure out what was causing it
Enjoy exploring! Hope you find it to be a good experience
Eventually you might find that you’re coming back to the PrivacyGuides.org page, that’s what most people recommend these days as a starting point for recommended tools. There are a lot of companies out there advertising privacy and security without actually PROVIDING privacy and security. It’s becoming a new buzzword
We recommend Mullvad Browser if you are focused on strong privacy protections and anti-fingerprinting out of the box, Firefox for casual internet browsers looking for a good alternative to Google Chrome, and Brave if you need Chromium browser compatibility.
So I think they only recommend Brave for those that need Chromium
For mobile browsers, I don’t quite understand the differences between each. I personally use Mull when I need it, but Brave might be better on Mobile still?
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