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Your goals aren't very clear. Your threat model matters a lot to answering the question. What is your threat model? Your browser alone is probably 10 fold the

Your goals aren't very clear. Your threat model matters a lot to answering the question. What is your threat model? Your browser alone is probably 10 fold the threat to your privacy the operating system is, and a share of the telemetry is legitimate and very much directly useful for improving the product and responding to incidents. Any linux distro probably won't hash/index all your files into a voice assistant, won't virus scan, and won't backup to a cloud, which is an immediate privacy and security win. If you want to engage in the privacy mindset, you must first focus on observability. Specifically you should be thinking about how to set up a proxy/firewall between your daily driver and the raw internet to see what is accessed. Without observability, you don't know what is doing what no matter what you use. You are forced to trust without understanding, and you wouldn't be able to answer your own question empirically. Without an off machine firewall, you can't prevent the behavior you want to prevent. For a long time OpenBSD had the reputation for being most secure by default. I don't know if that's still true. Running some type of observability/firewall platform on that would probably be useful. I've never used mitmproxy, but I imagine that would be useful.

deafpolygon 4y ago
> What is your threat model? That is why I'm asking HN. I'm the average citizen that wants privacy on by default while also providing as much convenience as a modern OS should allow. I am sure many people want this as well. > a share of the telemetry is legitimate and very much directly useful for improving the product and responding to incidents I don't agree with this statement. For example, I recently discovered in Microsoft Edge that: - In order to get your recent history matches in the address bar, you need to enable a feature that sends your queries back to Microsoft. Disabling this gets an empty address bar when typing. We used to have this feature WITHOUT sending data to anyone, just based off our search history. - Editor suggestions constantly send what you are typing in a text box, and provide you with suggestions to improve your spelling and grammar. I am not sure why this is necessary in this day and age, we've got the tools and software to do this directly on-device. - There are more, and I am sure most of these features are also baked into Google Chrome but sent to Alphabet instead. I don't agree that all of this telemetry is useful or even necessary. It smells like Microsoft is simply trying to bulk up its search engine business with a constant stream of user data. > If you want to engage in the privacy mindset, you must first focus on observability. I don't currently have the tools (much less the money or equipment to set up an off device firewall) right now to set this up. Even if I did, I'm not sure I would understand all of that without a lot of research. This is something the average person simply cannot do. Hell, this is difficult even for an IT person (such as myself) to muddle through. I appreciate your answer, but to be frank, it is somewhat of a non-answer. The bulk of it is not-that-helpful, because it does not help the average person. I'd love to answer every question I have empirically, but I don't have the time or the knowledge (at least, currently - I can learn, given time).
- hayst4ck 4y ago
  Sadly, I am not sure you will find a default private environment. There are many things you can do to improve your privacy, but almost all of them require action rather than selection. "Hardening" is probably the right search term. Given what you have said, I think any Linux environment will be fine for you and will result in immediate, significant privacy gains. All security is a trade off for convenience. If you want a more secure environment, you should expect a less convenient environment. I would choose a popular Linux environment. All of them are probably the right tradeoff. That being said: Without focusing on observability first, you end up with a lot of unknown unknowns. You might not think installing a home brew package on MacOS as something that violates your privacy, yet many will reach out to google for various artifacts, if not directly reporting analytics themselves. You will not get (good) privacy without a whitelist rather than blacklist environment. Paradoxically, modifications you make to your environment or using more bespoke environments can make you more easily identifiable. Eff runs a great website breaking down how finger-printable your browser is: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ As for priorities. A good OS choice will help you most from nation-state actors. So if your threat model is a government (as opposed to capitalists or hackers or scammers etc.), then Linux is the best choice. Tuned Firefox is probably the best browser choice. You will want to find a guide on how to "unfuck" the default settings. uBlock is non negotiable. PrivacyBadger and Decentraleyes are good plugins as well. After Firefox setting up a PiHole will offer a lot of privacy protection for minimal investment by essentially being a DNS firewall. A RaspberryPi is cheap and a fun tool. I totally recommend setting a RaspberryPi up with PiHole. After PiHole I imagine you could install MITMproxy on it or other interesting tools that would build in observability. > I don't agree with this statement. User data being used to power features is generally not what people would consider telemetry. While you are absolutely correct about how search suggestions etc work, that is not what I would consider telemetry. Telemetry is specifically data like crash reports, which can and sometimes will upload memory dumps that can contain plain text passwords or private keys that were loaded into memory. I promise you telemetry helps reduce downtime significantly. Telemetry itself is not evil, it is companies and how they use it that can be evil. If no one submitted telemetry it would make running stable services much harder. In a sense, the people who do submit telemetry are subsidizing you. I also almost universally shut off telemetry, but if everyone did that, it would definitely be problematic. Siri (or alexa, etc.) learning from your apps, sucks in just about everything you do on your phone, letting siri run wild likely greatly breaks privacy. Your phone keyboard can remember things you've typed or proper nouns you've used. Spotlight (or other file search features) will open and "understand" every file on your computer then index them so they are searchable. Virus scanners hash every file on your computer, then check to see if the hash is in their "evil" database. It doesn't take much imagination to see how, for example russia's kaspersky virus scanner could abuse that (or any other). > I don't currently have the tools (much less the money or equipment to set up an off device firewall) Buy a RaspberryPi and set up a PiHole. Something like this: https://www.adafruit.com/product/3775?src=raspberrypi https://www.adafruit.com/product/3775?src=raspberrypi Amazon has kits that provide the power cords and a nice looking protective case for probably $50 usd. It does not take much power at all to run firewalls/piholes/etc. I am sure there are plenty of approachable guides. > This is something the average person simply cannot do. I think it will have challenging moments but ultimately be much easier than you expect. Summary: Any linux distro, choose what feels best to use Firefox, follow a privacy guide to configure "about:config", install uBlock, PrivacyBadger, Decentraleyes Buy a RaspberryPi, set up PiHole (bonus) Set up a sane firewall on your linux machine or on a different machine (bonus) Consider setting up mitmproxy (bonus) Follow OpenSnitch (https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch) and consider trying it when you feel it is mature enough

deafpolygon 4y ago

> What is your threat model? That is why I'm asking HN. I'm the average citizen that wants privacy on by default while also providing as much convenience as a modern OS should allow. I am sure many people want this as well. > a share of the telemetry is legitimate and very much directly useful for improving the product and responding to incidents I don't agree with this statement. For example, I recently discovered in Microsoft Edge that: - In order to get your recent history matches in the address bar, you need to enable a feature that sends your queries back to Microsoft. Disabling this gets an empty address bar when typing. We used to have this feature WITHOUT sending data to anyone, just based off our search history. - Editor suggestions constantly send what you are typing in a text box, and provide you with suggestions to improve your spelling and grammar. I am not sure why this is necessary in this day and age, we've got the tools and software to do this directly on-device. - There are more, and I am sure most of these features are also baked into Google Chrome but sent to Alphabet instead. I don't agree that all of this telemetry is useful or even necessary. It smells like Microsoft is simply trying to bulk up its search engine business with a constant stream of user data. > If you want to engage in the privacy mindset, you must first focus on observability. I don't currently have the tools (much less the money or equipment to set up an off device firewall) right now to set this up. Even if I did, I'm not sure I would understand all of that without a lot of research. This is something the average person simply cannot do. Hell, this is difficult even for an IT person (such as myself) to muddle through. I appreciate your answer, but to be frank, it is somewhat of a non-answer. The bulk of it is not-that-helpful, because it does not help the average person. I'd love to answer every question I have empirically, but I don't have the time or the knowledge (at least, currently - I can learn, given time).

hayst4ck 4y ago
Sadly, I am not sure you will find a default private environment. There are many things you can do to improve your privacy, but almost all of them require action rather than selection. "Hardening" is probably the right search term. Given what you have said, I think any Linux environment will be fine for you and will result in immediate, significant privacy gains. All security is a trade off for convenience. If you want a more secure environment, you should expect a less convenient environment. I would choose a popular Linux environment. All of them are probably the right tradeoff. That being said: Without focusing on observability first, you end up with a lot of unknown unknowns. You might not think installing a home brew package on MacOS as something that violates your privacy, yet many will reach out to google for various artifacts, if not directly reporting analytics themselves. You will not get (good) privacy without a whitelist rather than blacklist environment. Paradoxically, modifications you make to your environment or using more bespoke environments can make you more easily identifiable. Eff runs a great website breaking down how finger-printable your browser is: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ As for priorities. A good OS choice will help you most from nation-state actors. So if your threat model is a government (as opposed to capitalists or hackers or scammers etc.), then Linux is the best choice. Tuned Firefox is probably the best browser choice. You will want to find a guide on how to "unfuck" the default settings. uBlock is non negotiable. PrivacyBadger and Decentraleyes are good plugins as well. After Firefox setting up a PiHole will offer a lot of privacy protection for minimal investment by essentially being a DNS firewall. A RaspberryPi is cheap and a fun tool. I totally recommend setting a RaspberryPi up with PiHole. After PiHole I imagine you could install MITMproxy on it or other interesting tools that would build in observability. > I don't agree with this statement. User data being used to power features is generally not what people would consider telemetry. While you are absolutely correct about how search suggestions etc work, that is not what I would consider telemetry. Telemetry is specifically data like crash reports, which can and sometimes will upload memory dumps that can contain plain text passwords or private keys that were loaded into memory. I promise you telemetry helps reduce downtime significantly. Telemetry itself is not evil, it is companies and how they use it that can be evil. If no one submitted telemetry it would make running stable services much harder. In a sense, the people who do submit telemetry are subsidizing you. I also almost universally shut off telemetry, but if everyone did that, it would definitely be problematic. Siri (or alexa, etc.) learning from your apps, sucks in just about everything you do on your phone, letting siri run wild likely greatly breaks privacy. Your phone keyboard can remember things you've typed or proper nouns you've used. Spotlight (or other file search features) will open and "understand" every file on your computer then index them so they are searchable. Virus scanners hash every file on your computer, then check to see if the hash is in their "evil" database. It doesn't take much imagination to see how, for example russia's kaspersky virus scanner could abuse that (or any other). > I don't currently have the tools (much less the money or equipment to set up an off device firewall) Buy a RaspberryPi and set up a PiHole. Something like this: https://www.adafruit.com/product/3775?src=raspberrypi https://www.adafruit.com/product/3775?src=raspberrypi Amazon has kits that provide the power cords and a nice looking protective case for probably $50 usd. It does not take much power at all to run firewalls/piholes/etc. I am sure there are plenty of approachable guides. > This is something the average person simply cannot do. I think it will have challenging moments but ultimately be much easier than you expect. Summary: Any linux distro, choose what feels best to use Firefox, follow a privacy guide to configure "about:config", install uBlock, PrivacyBadger, Decentraleyes Buy a RaspberryPi, set up PiHole (bonus) Set up a sane firewall on your linux machine or on a different machine (bonus) Consider setting up mitmproxy (bonus) Follow OpenSnitch (https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch) and consider trying it when you feel it is mature enough