I get you want privacy, but there’s a line where it just stops making sense, and your personal info isn’t that valuable. Anyway
Actually, you don’t need perfect privacy. You just need good enough privacy, and here’s why:
If you’re a low-value target - i.e. a random internet user, that’s you and me - always remember that your value is low: Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook… expend a certain amount of resources to fish for enough of your data to earn them a return on their investment. We’re low-value targets, so they first and foremost go for the low hanging fruits: the people who don’t know, don’t care, wallow in social media without any restraint and make it particularly easy to gather data from.
All you have to do is make it hard enough and expensive enough for the corporate surveillance collective to lose money on you: create accounts full of fake data and don’t post personal information - or make up fake personal information in your posts - to poison their wells. Don’t post photos of you or your family. Use throwaway email addresses. Use a deGoogled phone. Don’t browse without an ad blocker set on reasonably high. Use a browser with anti-fingerprinting. Don’t fill out Costco membership cards. Pay with cash stuff that you don’t want anybody to know about. Etc etc.
In other words, adopt a reasonable-enough privacy hygiene so that you’re not part of the low hanging fruits. It doesn’t have to be drastic, just good enough to make you not worth the sonsabitches’ time and effort.
If you’re a high-value target however, a Snowden or an Assange, that’s a different proposition. But for the rest of us, private enough is good enough.
When I’m in a GUI, I like the Win95 UI paradigm. That’s one of the few good things that came out of Microsoft: I like the classic Windows look-and-feel. That’s why I run Mint / Cinnamon. I’ve tried minimalistic tiling window managers and I can’t stand them.
However - and that’s the weird thing - most of what I do in Cinnamon is open terminals with tmux that I… tile. And within one tmux pane or window, there’s a very good chance I’ll run vim with several files edited in split screens 🙂
I spend 75% of my time working in a terminal - sometimes in a real Linux console, but most of the time in a Cinnamon terminal. And I’ll do the minimalistic thing within the terminal because that’s how I’ve been rolling since the early eighties and it’s just how my workflow is most efficient. But I really like the Windows-like graphical environment around the terminals. Call me weird…
…and how six months later, it all amounted to jack squat and Reddit is back to business as usual. Exactly how Reddit correctly figured outraged internet warriors would get all worked up for a while and then lose interest.
“I’m looking for a privacy respecting vacuum robot” must be one of the most dystopian sentences I’ve read in quite some time.
I mean there is no lack of dystopian stuff going around these days. But if you imagine someone saying that 30 years ago, that someone would have conceivably ended up in a lunatic asylum. In 2024 however, it’s a perfectly valid and apropos question.
Aah yes, appimage, flatpak, snaps, progressive web apps, electron apps… The cross-compatibility of the lazy 21st century developer, where a simple IRC-like chat client comes with an entire operating system or an entire browser (which itself is an entire operating system too nowadays), takes up half a gig of disk space, and starts up in over 10 seconds with a multi-gigahertz multicore CPU.
This is where you clearly see Apple is all about privacy posturing and not much about actual privacy.
If they really cared about their customers’ privacy, they would require notification servers registered with APN to push notifications encrypted with a key that only the recipient apps have the private key to. This would be true end-to-end encryption, and Apple would only relay encrypted notifications across, enabling them to deny all subpoenas and any kind of snooping requests from law enforcement on the simple basis that they plain can’t even decode the notifications in the first place.
The very fact that they do have access to the notifications in clear-text is undeniable evidence that they actively want and do collaborate with law enforcement.
Meaning Apple’s stance on privacy is utter BS - something anybody with a modicum of critical thinking suspected from the start, but now the evidence is crystal-clear.
That’s the state of computing in 2023: a browser disguised as a native app running 15 layers of Javascript is used as a friggin terminal. And nobody bats an eyelids, as if the utter insanity of it made any sense.
And the installer is 117M compressed. That’s MEGABYTES… For a terminal!
Although it’s true: they probably do know a lot more about stuff that matters to their generation than you do, just like you knew more than your parents about stuff that mattered to you as a kid.
And yes, I agree, they do get exposed to the Big Tech party line a lot. But don’t underestimate the kids: they’re smart, they can tell BS when they see it more than you think, and they’re not that easy to indoctrinate.
I know that because when I was a kid, we had our own tech overlords (in my generation, the phone company) and we walked all over them despite the propaganda and apparent overwhelming power. Why would today’s kids be any different?
The fight for privacy is not new, and it predates the internet by far.
The problem is that, in the past, the state was on your side in the fight for privacy. Today, it sides with Big Tech and whoever offers it the most data to conduct its own privacy violations, or pays our elected officials the most.
It’s a bit overwhelming when giant, unchecked and unaccountable monopolies and your own country, both with almost infinite resources and legal ways to do whatever they want with impunity, gang up on you at the same time.
Open-source isn’t a guarantee that whoever makes the open-source software is privacy-respecting. Android was made by Google for example, and it was made open-source for the express purpose of creating a mobile OS ecosystem that would become so dominant it would allow Google to collect data on as many people as possible. Google invested massive amounts of money developing an entire operating system for a reason: they didn’t do it out of kindness.
Conversely, closed source isn’t a guarantee that whoever makes the software is up to no good. There’s plenty of closed source software out there that’s perfectly legit. But of course it’s harder to verify the code if you have doubts.