Average Joe wants an easy all-in-one solution. That’s what Google, Apple and Microsoft offer. An ecosystem. If you want to fight that, you need to be able to offer that. So that’s what Proton is doing.

Of course it’s better to have it seperated. And the security and privacy nerds will likely keep doing that anyways. But Average Joe doesn’t want to take a hassle and rather looses privacy than do that.

Issue is, things are only as secure as the least secure point. Average Joe using Google and Microsoft means your data also goes there when interacting. When Average Joe is swayed by a place that is privacy-friendly ánd convinient, it makes your weakest link also stronger.

Meanwhile, Average Joe is also more save then when he was using Google or Microsoft services. Even when he would be less save than if he had his stuff seperated.

It helps everyone.

With that in mind, I applaud it. But I won’t use it. I use Proton for mail, Joplin for notes (encrypting them in Joplin and syncing with NextCloud), and my passwords are also elsewhere than ProtonPass.

For one, USA isn’t actually much better than China when it comes to tracking and privacy. They just have better PR about it. But in reality they equally suck.

That asside. There isn’t some secret tracking chip, but any kind of wireless network will be used to track you by different parties. Cellulair, Wi-Fi (including Wi-Fi signaling when it’s “off”), Bluetooth, etc. This is a fact regardless of OS or where the phone is made, as tracking often already starts to occur by catching the signals you send out.

As such, just degoogling won’t resolve tracking issues in and off itself, it’s just one of many steps to get less tracking.

Phones physically in China, regardless off where it’s made, tend to get tracking software installed. Just take a burner if you ever go there. But that’s not hardware. And most “USA” phones are also made in China anyways…

My issue is more with trackers than ads anyways, altrough ads that block so much that using the site normally becomes a pain in the ass are the other extend which is sadly also getting more and more common. But sadly most websites and services that let you pay to get rid of ads will still put everything full of trackers…

Also, there are quite some sites that just copy content or or have an AI write content, made to rank high in searches, then is putbfull of adds to make money. Those are automated money-farms, and deserve blockers.

I block everything, ads and trackers alike. Somewhat regularily I’m on the web without and it’s always a great reminder why I normally do use them.

But I also pay for multiple websites and services I use regularily despite them working fine without paying or having “free” alternatives. After all, nothing is free and I rather pay with money than with data. And I also want to be paid for my work, and I can only imagine so do others. So I do agree with you there, and I highly encourage people to pay for stuff.

But I won’t feel bad for blocking that shit, also not on the websites I don’t financially support. Because most of the time they are the ones that made it impossible to use their website privacy-friendly without blocking stuff anyways, even if I’m willing to pay.

You can try getting your hands on an AsteroidOS compatible watch and flash it with that. It’s basically Linux on your wrist. There is a health app here and the required sensor logging is here, which are in early development but work well in what it does, like step counting and heartbeat graph. Past days aren’t shown further than a week but they are logged, so you could probably get it by hand in terminal after accessing the watch with SSH if you need to until it’s implemented (I think it’s on the to do list).

It’s my daily watch for months now, sold my Galaxy Watch4 in favor for it. It works well, is completely FOSS, and works without internet, bluetooth, or phone. Altrough both can be enabled and phones can be connected with GadgetBridge or their own app. Both are in F-Droid. You won’t find a more privacy friendly smartwatch solution really.

There is an issues with the current nightlies tho, so downloads are taken offline for now. So you need to wait for that or see if anyone has old files from before the issue.

Devs are quite active on Matrix. If you have no patience you can ask there if anyone has the files. Any kind of support is also allowed there, no matter if it’s very noob or advanced level.

I think ActivityPup isn’t even integrated into Threads yet? On release they said soon, a week later they said it was long-time planning. Haven’t heard about it since.

Fcitx5 for Android has decent Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese. I don’t think it has handwriting tho. Otherwise you have Trime, which is Rime for Android but I’ve never got it to work properly (unlike Rime on Linux which works fine).

I mainly use simplified, so don’t pin me on traditional options. I use Florisboard for English.

Article says:

We’re also beginning the beta for our upcoming macOS desktop app for Proton Drive. […] Once the macOS app is released, we’ll also work on our planned Linux version.

Based on Proton’s trackrecord in development times I’ld say a far future, but I must admit they’ve been making meters lately when it comes to releasing stuff. It may be sooner than expected (or it might take years, we’d have to wait and see).

Privacy is not a black & white thing. Every step you take matters. And being entirely private without digital footprint is impossible unless you isolate yourself from the internet entirely.

To answer your question. Yes, they spy on you. To what degree depends on the OS and your settings. But they always cost you some privacy.

But it’s never useless to take other steps just because you don’t want to or can’t switch OS. Because you’ll still give them less data if you do. They might still have info on you. But the less, the better.

Taking easier steps like switching mail provider and other services you use to privacy-minded ones are a good and easy start anyone can do. Replacing apps/programs on your system with FOSS or privacy-minded ones is another good one.

Even the biggest noob can make a Proton account and use it instead of Gmail/Outlook. Use 1Password instead of your device/browser’s password manager. Use LibreOffice instead of MS Office. Check F-droid for apps before Google Play (and perhaps even use Aurora when you do need it). Use FireFox instead of Edge or Chrome. Install a FOSS keyboard on your phone. Get rid of Social Media. Use Signal instead of WhatsApp. Those are just some example of easy my-grandpa-can-do-this level of difficulty options that already greatly improve your privacy (in fact, after I installed it for him, my grandpa does many of these!). Is it as private as an extremely hardened custom device by a security expert? Nah, but it’s definitly much beter than a default device full of big-tech apps. Even if you just do 1 of them!

Since every step counts, I think we should apploud people for caring and starting to take steps instead of deminish them for not going in to the max. Changes like this are slow, especially with a big mass of people. The more people show they care, the more privacy-minded alternatives grow and show up and the more normal it becomes to care about privacy.

it would be possible to bypass the correct accounting of funds. Financial fraud

Well, sure but it’ll be quite difficult to hide a large increase in revenue still. Large unussual transactions generally have to be flagged by banks, so receiving and moving around revenue of sold data from your non-profit wouldn’t be thát easy unless they only allow crypto or cash. Surely it’s possible, but financial fraud on that level is quite difficult and often falls trough sooner or later. Or, the other option is that they don’t earn that much from it making it easy to hide, but that sounds like a lot of effort and potential risk for little gain.

Either way, the financial numbers is just one of the reasons. But trust is never build on one thing, it’s built on the combination of them. With all things I mentioned, I don’t exactly get the feeling it’s all hanging on finacial fraud.

The question is also how to check the traffic on the iPhone, if there are even no monitoring tools there.

Use a network you controll (like your home WiFi) and check in- and outgoing traffic network wide instead of on-device.

You cannot check other peoples stuff all the time, but I’d suggest not sending sensitive information to people you don’t trust as they could leak it (be it on purpose or not). And depending on level of sensitivity, just speak face-to-face in a private place. There is always a form of digital footprint when doing stuff digital. In the end, you should always assume that nothing is 100% safe, and anything cán be hacked. Trusting digital communication to be 100% safe is foolish. Look at situations like the Encrochat debacle for example. The question is more, which risks are worth it in your threat model. For most people, Signal is good enough as the risks it does have aren’t in their threat model at all.

Well outside of the general open source and E2EE stuff, there are a few more things.

They’re under a non-profit foundation and charity to which donating is tax-deducatble. That means they have to publicice their financial numbers. Selling data would generate a sudden revenue, which would draw attention.

They also regularily do external audits, both from external audit organisations as individuals. This list was made in august 2022, you can likely find a newer list somewhere. I just did a quick search for you. https://community.signalusers.org/t/overview-of-third-party-security-audits/13243

Signal also runs perfectly fine without anything Google btw. It uses PlayServices only if you have it on your phone (otherwise it just uses WebSockets), as it preserves battery life. However, it doesn’t actually send data to Google over PlayServices. Instead it sends an empty notification, which wakes the phone and is recognised by Signal as a trigger to make it connect to Signal servers to grab data directly from there. If you wish, you can check this in the code yourself. I guess you may also be able to confirm this looking at network traffic from and to your phone.

Also a note on the E2EE. Another important thing is that not only the message is encrypted, but also the metadata. Unlike most other chatapps like WhatsApp; who knows where you are, who you talk to, how often, etc. You could theoretically also check this by checking outgoing traffic if you wish.

This also means that unless they somehow secretly have a copy of your private key, there is no data for them to sell anyways. The fact that even in court they’ve didn’t have data to show, them passing many external audits without this being a point (sometimes issues are found, which is normal. If audits are always perfect I’d be more warry. But never on this point afaik), and that nothing in the code nor internet traffic points to them possibly having this, makes me not that worried about the idea that they secretly got a copy of peoples private keys.

So overal while it’s perhaps technically possible they secretly run something else on their server and build a back door to read your messages, they are many things that show they don’t, and literally nothing that would say they do. And neither does there seem to be any reason why, since they can’t sell it nor give it in court. So unless you believe they have some evil bigger plan, I don’t see the reason to doubt.

And a little note. Privacy people can be crazy, and I say that in a positive way! If you can check it, people no doubt have, and issues would’ve been found. Yet many people deep into it still vouch for it. That says something. And the less crazy people profit of this. This is similar to why many big FOSS projects are considered safe even if you didn’t check all code yourself. And before you say “but if everyone thinks like that”, realise that the craziest don’t trust other people either. While smaller projects could hide perhaps, the real big/famous projects like Signal, Linux, LibreOffice, etc would fall trough as soon as they start doing shit.

It depends on your goal.

If you just want privacy for your daily not-to-weird usage and ease in both in the sense of setting it up and in that of good results and that’s it, DDG is probably fine for you.

I use Brave, simply because unlike most others, it has it’s own crawler. For me it’s results have been slightly better than DDG too, but I also hear people claim the opposite so I guess it really depends. DDG uses Bing’s results, and many others are also more like privacy front-ends for Bing or Google. If you want to totaly leave Big Tech, be it to not help with their power or because of principle, that’s likely the one that’s the most easy with the best results that fits.

SearXNG is self hosted and less accurate, but the most privacy friendly and not attached to any company as you host your own instance, while with Brave you still rely on Brave’s goodness. If you want total control, you want something like this.

I don’t use anything else from Brave, and default search engines are easy to change, so I’m personally not too worried about Brave’s power over me. I do preffer to stay away from Google and Microsoft, and only access them (prefferably trough privacy front-ends) if no other option works decent enough for me. I also prefer not to self-host due to the time and knowledge needed to do so securely. Well, I have knowledge, but I don’t want to worry about those things for my peivaye stuff all the time. Hence the choice of Brave.

It depends on your goal.

If you just want privacy for your daily not-to-weird usage and ease in both in the sense of setting it up and in that of good results and that’s it, DDG is probably fine for you.

I use Brave, simply because unlike most others, it has it’s own crawler. For me it’s results have been slightly better than DDG too, but I also hear people claim the opposite so I guess it really depends. DDG uses Bing’s results, and many others are also more like privacy front-ends for Bing or Google. If you want to totaly leave Big Tech, be it to not help with their power or because of principle, that’s likely the one that’s the most easy with the best results that fits.

SearXNG is self hosted and less accurate, but the most privacy friendly and not attached to any company as you host your own instance, while with Brave you still rely on Brave’s goodness. If you want total control, you want something like this.

I don’t use anything else from Brave, and default search engines are easy to change, so I’m personally not too worried about Brave’s power over me. I do preffer to stay away from Google and Microsoft, and only access them (prefferably trough privacy front-ends) if no other option works decent enough for me. I also prefer not to self-host due to the time and knowledge needed to do so securely. Well, I have knowledge, but I don’t want to worry about those things for my peivaye stuff all the time. Hence the choice of Brave.

There are quite some results if you search online, but here’s one with some specific info: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/129917/how-does-a-website-know-the-dns-server-a-client-uses

but I think Google will do more. They’ve been trying to break it for ages. It’s one of those never ending fights. Doubt it’ll end soon.

Even if it does, then we’re at a point that “just use a good browser and uBlock Origin” also won’t cut it. Honestly, those will break much sooner than dedicated projects that are much more sophisticated in getting around YT-stuff. As soon as they put a login requirement on the site, which is needed to break apps like NewPipe, the browser + uBlock idea already won’t cut it anymore, no matter if you got a VPN ot not.

As for Aurora, as long as Average Joe still uses Google Play without a care I’m not too worried about it. People use AdBlock for the ease, but using Aurora doesnt’t give ease. It’s only the tiny group of privacy people interested in it, which is a much smaller demographic that’ll be hard to convert to Google services. If they break Aurora, the amount of non-playstore requests to developers is going to to pump up and as long as stuff like APKMirror and apk downloads from vendors still exist people will download by hand over using the Play Store. It’s a lot of trouble that likely just leads people further away from Google.

Well, you’re right. I was mixing a few things up in my head. My bad. Altrough I did find a few interesting ways that can be used by websites to find client side DNS, it isn’t exactly the norm or likely to hit you with custom setups.

I retract my point on DNS, but the general notion that do-it-yourself isn’t always better stays. Al be it off-topic here now.

NewPipe (on Piped technology) is working fine here? As long as YT isn’t behind a login they will keep working. If they do put it behind login, tbf they’ll likely find way around it again sooner or later.

I agree that front-ends are always in an endless fight against these Big Tech solutions. But for content not available on other platforms it’s an necesity and a better solution than simply an adblocker. And sadly it’ll take a long time before content moves away, Average Joe isn’t really worried about Google as much as they are about the cons of moving away from YT.

As I said:

as it’ll make fingerprinting also much easier.

Fingerprinting is a technique where they look at everything they can grab from received requests and try to use that info to identify people. The things you block (like ads and trackers), the used DNS, your user agent, your IP, etc. It’s all used to try to identify you. The more you blend in with others, the harder to identify you are. The more custom stuff you have, the easier to identify you are.

If fingerprinting or not having to trust third parties is more important depends on your threat model. But it’s important to know the risks of a trust-no-one do-it-yourself approach when making the decision.

Use your own.

That may not always be the best way to go, as it’ll make fingerprinting also much easier. The more custom your setup is, the less there are like you, the easier your tracked by fingerprinting techniques.

Not saying it’s bad per se, but the idea that trusting no one and setting everything up yourself is always more private isn’t true either. Both providers and do-it-yourself have negative sides one should stay critical about.

I actually used to have YT Premium because I’m a strong believer that nothing is free, so you either pay with data or money (on anything slightly commercial, not counting FOSS projects made as hobby or under foundations etc. as things get more complex then. But even then I pay/donate for some stuff in the same way of reasoning).

Yet I cancled the YT Premium subscription. Simply for one reason, privacy. I don’t mind paying, but then I don’t want just no adds, I also want no tracking. I pay with money, so I don’t want to pay with data as well having a whole profile made.

Switched to NewPipe with sponsorblock on phone and TV and FreeTube on PC. Got a redirect extension in FireFox automatically sending YT videos to either Invidious or Pipe.

No, that right is to have info tracable to you personally removed, not to have every word you ever stated removed. As long as they anonymise it, they’re good legally and can keep all other data online.

They also only have to send a data delete request to those they shared it with. Any data that got scraped or taken in other ways from them by a third party is technically not protected under that law, and would require a deletion request from you to them. And let now that be the technique used to federate.

Not to forget that the law only counts for services hosted in or aimed at European Union citizen. For example, an American Lemmy instance aimed specifically at American citizen isn’t bound by it, even if you join as a European Union Citizen. If they market to the whole world or such, then they are bound by it. But then, with a US-based server it’s already nearly impossible to be GDPR compliant as US-law is by default against GDPR. Hence big SNS’s having EU subsidaries and servers (and still have huge disagreements, lawsuits and fines about how data gets shared between those and non-EU servers). Point being, with defederated systems, there are bound to be servers with your data that are outside the scope of the GDPR. The whole thing is more complex than “I live in the EU so all sites need to comply when it regards me”.