lens17Apr 1, 2024

What privacy friendly app/service/stuff makes your life simpler?

https://feddit.de/post/10637429

What privacy friendly app/service/stuff makes your life simpler? - Feddit

I am trying to re-adjust how much effort I want to put into privacy concerns. Too much stuff I’m using isn’t working properly or using a lot of my mental resources that I need elsewhere. For (a bad) example: I recently performed a half-switch from my self-hosted Nextcloud instance to ProtonDrive, in the hope that it would spare me the stress to maintain my private Nextcloud. Unfortunately, it doesn’t, as basic functionality like cross-device-sync is not possible (there isn’t even a client app for Linux, as of yet). This brings me to the question: have you found any services/apps/stuff that significantly eases your life while still being privacy friendly? I know, this is a broad question, but I think this is for the best as this thread then maybe even has use for other users.

Show threadLWDApr 1, 2024
Mobile Fennec (or pick your poison for any Firefox fork) has made browsing overall much better. Between ad blocking, Enhanced Tracking Protection and a paywall-bypassing extension, browsing is overall less tedious than a comparable Chromelike.
Show threadFutileRecipeApr 1, 2024

Mobile Fennec (or pick your poison for any Firefox fork)…

I can’t get behind Android Firefox/Gecko-based due to their lack of security:

Avoid Gecko-based browsers like Firefox as they’re currently much more vulnerable to exploitation and inherently add a huge amount of attack surface. Gecko doesn’t have a WebView implementation (GeckoView is not a WebView implementation), so it has to be used alongside the Chromium-based WebView rather than instead of Chromium, which means having the remote attack surface of two separate browser engines instead of only one. Firefox / Gecko also bypass or cripple a fair bit of the upstream and GrapheneOS hardening work for apps. Worst of all, Firefox does not have internal sandboxing on Android. This is despite the fact that Chromium semantic sandbox layer on Android is implemented via the OS isolatedProcess feature, which is a very easy to use boolean property for app service processes to provide strong isolation with only the ability to communicate with the app running them via the standard service API. Even in the desktop version, Firefox’s sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux) and lacks full support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole. The sandbox has been gradually improving on the desktop but it isn’t happening for their Android browser yet.

Ref: grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing

GrapheneOS usage guide

Usage instructions for GrapheneOS, a security and privacy focused mobile OS with Android app compatibility.

GrapheneOS
Show threadLWD

Personally, I’m okay with shouldering the security risk considering the internet-wide toxicity of Chrome and forks.

Lynx would be more secure than either.

Apr 1, 2024 at 8:47pmWeb
Show threadFutileRecipeApr 2, 2024

okay with shouldering the security risk

To me, that depends on what you use the phone for. I sometimes use mine for banking as well as logging into various sites, so I want to reasonably minimize the security risk I am taking. If I wasn’t, then sure.