Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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"You need to try Linux" (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 day ago by digital_alchemist@discuss.tchncs.de to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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Originally this was a reply to this article about a Windows feature called Recall, but there's a good argument the author's concerns resonate far beyond Windows and Meta to proprietary generally.

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[–] index@sh.itjust.works 2 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Like, there are a lot of reasons to switch to linux and plenty of them are compelling. But its an absolute fantasy to believe you’re somehow immune to surveillance because you’re using the same software as Amazon’s EC2. Does anyone really believe the NSA hasn’t cracked Linux Mint yet?

It's much harder for the government and bad actors to hide backdoors in open source software than making a deal with a private company

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

For the proprietary software, a lot of it is front-doors. Literally just pay-to-prey. Government agencies pay the big data companies to access their warehouses of scrapped data that come directly off their clients' machines through explicit information harvesting protocols.

That said, it is technically harder to have a covert backdoor in an open source system. But it isn't impossible, or even particularly impractical, so long as the vulnerability remains reasonably obscure. It would be naive to assume your standard array of linux oses are unassailable.