this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2025
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Privacy

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Everything about privacy (the confidentiality pillar of security) -- but not restricted to infosec. Offline privacy is also relevant here.

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I'm checking out various "personal knowledge management" tools in a sandbox to see if it be an upgrade my ragtag collection of text file-based notes. (fedia.io)
submitted 2 months ago by loadhigh@bitbang.social to c/privacy@fedia.io
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I'm checking out various "personal knowledge management" tools in a sandbox to see if it be an upgrade my ragtag collection of text file-based notes.

First candidate is #Logseq, supposedly "privacy-first".

How #privacy friendly is something based on Electron (aka Chrome)? Debatable, but then they also do this:

  1. Have "Send usage data" on by default
  2. Start with an example page that embeds a YouTube video, and accepts all cookies

tcpdump and mitmproxy go wild when starting the program.

Shows that the "Send usage data and diagnostics to Logseq" setting is enabled by default.
Shows the services being contacted by Logseq over HTTPS right after starting it for the first time. Hosts that are being contact: www.youtube.com, googleads.g.doubleclick.net, jnn-pa-googleapis.com, play.google.com, app.posthog.com, o416451.ingest.sentry.io

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[–] loadhigh@bitbang.social 1 points 2 months ago (23 children)

Next up is #Obsidian, a tool I'm hesitant to consider because of the developers' view on open source. Hence, the source is not available except the obfuscated JavaScript that's ran by Electron.

Despite that, Obsidian itself only does a version check (which can be disabled) and starts in "restricted mode" by default, which disallows third-party plugins (but does still embed external content when asked to.)

There's some phoning home by Chrome but far less than with Logseq.

Color me surprised.

The program defaults to "restricted mode." "Would you like to exit Restricted Mode to enable community plugins? We strongly recommend making backups of your data before doing so."

[–] loadhigh@bitbang.social 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Funnily enough, when it comes to code by other people the developers do see the value of open source.

[–] kepano@mastodon.social 1 points 2 months ago

@loadhigh@bitbang.social fwiw the developers of Obsidian also produce open source projects

  • JSON Canvas (MIT): an open format for canvas data
  • Web Clipper (MIT): highlight and save content from the web to Markdown
  • Importer (MIT): convert proprietary formats to Markdown

and dozens of other open source projects under their own personal accounts

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