Privacy Guides
In the digital age, protecting your personal information might seem like an impossible task. We’re here to help.
This is a community for sharing news about privacy, posting information about cool privacy tools and services, and getting advice about your privacy journey.
You can subscribe to this community from any Kbin or Lemmy instance:
Check out our website at privacyguides.org before asking your questions here. We've tried answering the common questions and recommendations there!
Want to get involved? The website is open-source on GitHub, and your help would be appreciated!
This community is the "official" Privacy Guides community on Lemmy, which can be verified here. Other "Privacy Guides" communities on other Lemmy servers are not moderated by this team or associated with the website.
Moderation Rules:
- We prefer posting about open-source software whenever possible.
- This is not the place for self-promotion if you are not listed on privacyguides.org. If you want to be listed, make a suggestion on our forum first.
- No soliciting engagement: Don't ask for upvotes, follows, etc.
- Surveys, Fundraising, and Petitions must be pre-approved by the mod team.
- Be civil, no violence, hate speech. Assume people here are posting in good faith.
- Don't repost topics which have already been covered here.
- News posts must be related to privacy and security, and your post title must match the article headline exactly. Do not editorialize titles, you can post your opinions in the post body or a comment.
- Memes/images/video posts that could be summarized as text explanations should not be posted. Infographics and conference talks from reputable sources are acceptable.
- No help vampires: This is not a tech support subreddit, don't abuse our community's willingness to help. Questions related to privacy, security or privacy/security related software and their configurations are acceptable.
- No misinformation: Extraordinary claims must be matched with evidence.
- Do not post about VPNs or cryptocurrencies which are not listed on privacyguides.org. See Rule 2 for info on adding new recommendations to the website.
- General guides or software lists are not permitted. Original sources and research about specific topics are allowed as long as they are high quality and factual. We are not providing a platform for poorly-vetted, out-of-date or conflicting recommendations.
Additional Resources:
- EFF: Surveillance Self-Defense
- Consumer Reports Security Planner
- Jonah Aragon (YouTube)
- r/Privacy
- Big Ass Data Broker Opt-Out List
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There's many reasons not to get an iPhone, but privacy worries, in contrast to Android, is not one of them.
Rather than take an all or nothing attitude on the matter, I certainly think your friend would be better off trying make smart choices with his data whenever possible. Ultimately though, it's something that he has to be motivated to do himself. Perhaps informing him of potential privacy risks would be helpful in that regard.
How does getting an iPhone not worry someone about privacy? Do you believe that Apple doesn't collect as much data as Google?
Apple charges unreasonably high profit margins on its products as its primary business model, along with locking down their ecosystem to push overpriced subscriptions to the detriment of competitors, to not need the same level of invasive data collection that powers Google's advertising business.
That seems hopeful at best. Lol
Basically, you trust Apple to not be as bad as Google. I hope you realise how flawed your assumption is. Capitalism doesn't consider morality in its wake
Well, I don’t see Google protesting when they’re forced to compromise privacy or security by governments. And we sure as hell wouldn’t see Google leak a secret order to backdoor their products that they were forbidden from revealing.
They aren’t great, but they sure as hell aren’t anywhere as bad as Google, and anyone that argues otherwise is either incredibly misinformed on the topic, or doing so in bad faith.
I’ll leave it to you to decide where you fit into that.
I believe they are equally bad, just that Apple takes the effort to present better optics of their actions whilst Google doesn't care.
Assuming for arguments sake that they do, which corporation do you think should get a better grade when privacy is the concern?
Apple, which has gone to court time and again to protect the privacy and security of their product, and leaked that a western government ordered them to backdoor their product when they were ordered not to reveal that, or Google, an advertising giant that uses every tool that having one of the largest mobile OSes on the planet gives them to not only invade that privacy, but to sell it to everyone with money, and give access away to the US government before they even demand it?
They're both rock bottom, and that's the best I can give. However, I will accept a concession in that my argument is more geared towards trying to escape Big Tech surveillance as a whole, not from any specific company. I admit that was a bold move from Apple but that's our perception of the situation; you don't actually know the discussions that happened and their inner workings because both companies aren't transparent in their dealings
With the exception to GrapheneOS, compared to stock Android and Apple its much more secure and private since it removes everything connected to Google on it.
Then by using Free/Libre Open Source Software apps on F-Droid, as the replacement for Google Play, you can effectively eliminate trackers from your device using apps like Exodus that provides detailed breakdowns on app trackers and permissions.
As well as TrackerControl where you are given granular control over trackers on apps and even on websites you visit. It blocks analytic, fingerprinting, advertising, and other uncategorized trackers.
Then using Privacy Browser you can browse the web using TOR further enhancing your privacy. Whilst having built in tracker, cookie, javascript, and DOM storage controls.
Communicate through Molly (hardened version of Signal only available on android) or Threema and you can keep your communications secure and private.
Couple that with using a VPN like Mullvad or Proton and you can be very private on Android, that of which you cannot achieve on iOS where Apple has built in telemetry harvesting.
So I would say that compared to Apple, Android CAN be far more private and secure, I personally don't trust that Apple users are private at all considering Apple harvests telemetry and most users use iCloud which, whilst having Advanced Data Protection for most users, they literally took this away from UK residents more recently effectively exposing all of their content.
Apple disabled the feature in the UK because the alternative, per the British government, was to add a backdoor to it.
That doesn't change the fact that it's insecure and will likely become even more insecure as more governments demand more of the same in the name of "protecting the children".
Regardless if Apple's actions were better than the alternative, devices devoid of such vulnerabilities such as degoogled phones are inherently more secure and private.
Privacy and security isn't an all-or-nothing matter though. While a Pixel running GrapheneOS would indeed be more secure privacy-wise than an iPhone, not only would one have to be willing to do without a digital wallet, among other features that unfortunately have telemetry injected into them, but would still depend on the user not installing any of the common apps that would harvest data, even on a de-Googled phone.