Technology

37735 readers

53 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

TheRtRevKaiser@kbin.social

Re-Focusing on Privacy-Focused Applications - Where to Begin? (self.technology)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Rekorse to c/technology

34 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Now, I am hoping I am not the only one in this community who has realized that privacy should be one of the top considerations when choosing what software to use on any device.

Leaving Reddit has been the catalyst for me to realize this, as silly as that might sound, and now I have to re-evaluate my list of "convenient" apps that are in NO WAY secure or private.

I want to ask everyone here if they have any recommendations for essentially replacement applications for all of the major categories of software that we use on our computers and mobile devices.

For example, here are some of the switches I made today: Chrome Mobile > Opera Mobile Chrome Desktop > Opera Desktop Facebook Messenger > Signal Facebook Social Media > No alternative just deleted it.

My hope with this post is that we can have a discussion on privacy apps in general as trying to track down information for each sector one by one and test each out can be arduous.

To kick off the discussion here are some other categories that I have not figured out an answer for yet:

Search Engines (duckduckgo is mentioned a lot, why?) Operating Systems Cloud Storage Email Providers Podcasts Video/Music Services (Youtube, Paid services, etc) Environment Specific advice for Android, iOS, and any others.

Also if it makes sense, should we consider privacy when choosing, say, a news website to frequent? Or would browser choice ultimately be the decider there.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] furrowsofar 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Also please realize, that the Threadiverse is not so much about privacy. Pretty much everything we do here is public. Moving to the threadiverse is more about avoiding the "shitification" movement at R$, and the other sorts of user manipulation, and walled gardening that are happening or may happen.

[–] Rekorse 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah I was trying not to mix the two up, so my apologies for that. I will say that it seems privacy and open-source are talked about together quite often so maybe that's part of it.

[–] furrowsofar 3 points 1 year ago

Only mentioned just to make sure you were clear. There has also been discussions in other threads about this which tended to suggest people are not thinking all that clearly about this. I am highly pro-threadiverse and though I take steps to be kind of anonymous, privacy is not a driving force for me choosing the threadiverse.

Privacy is not one thing anyway and never complete, and FOSS is not one thing too. For example, that though I like these privacy sites like Privacy Guides and others I will not always agree with their choices and suggestions. Part of this is that my goals, sensibilities, and experience may differ for example. For example, I did not see Privacy Guides recommend any of the main line Debian distributions, but I only use Debian and Ubuntu and personally for me they are just fine. Similarly with Firefox. Lot of people always recommending other stuff typically Chromium based browsers. For me this is nuts simply because I am not interested in a Google and Ad dominated web. Everyone has their arguments, I just do not always have to agree.

As for FOSS. There are a lot of aspects and privacy, security, and transparency are some common aspects that are related but are often mixed and confused. FOSS does not guarantee privacy and security and all security and privacy is porous and never total anyway. On the other hand I tend to believe that you never really have enough transparency to even evaluate it in closed software. Too many examples of closed systems purposely doing stuff that is anti-user on one hand, and on the other, just having rushed poorly designed systems without any possibility of review on the other.