3 ms·
Using a firewall to protect your privacy from the company that designed the hardware and wrote the software for your computer is kind of like putting on a rainc
by djur 4y ago
Using a firewall to protect your privacy from the company that designed the hardware and wrote the software for your computer is kind of like putting on a raincoat before going swimming.
- ok123456 4y agoWhy do they deserve any trust when they're phoning home?
- scarface74 4y agoThe person you are replying to is saying that at some level you have to trust someone and “open source” is not the answer. There have been plenty of latent bugs in Linux that took years to discover that could have led to information extraction
- ok123456 4y ago"Every platform has RVEs eventually" is a pretty lazy answer. The answer is to stop normalizing telemetry and data exfiltration even if it's 'the good guys' doing it. It's not your "cloud" therefore it's not your data.
- scarface74 4y agoSo if you are not going to trust anyone are you going to stop using computers?
- ok123456 4y agoNo. Just don't use "cloud" "services" like this or LassPass.
- djur 4y agoNo, that's not what I'm saying. I think it's conceivable that with a great deal of effort you could build an open source system that is highly trustworthy. What I'm saying is that the gradient between "highly trustworthy" and "untrustworthy" is extremely steep. To use another analogy, someone using a firewall to keep a MacBook from phoning home is like a person who invests in a really high-quality lock on their jewelry box to keep their housecleaner from stealing from them.
- scarface74 4y agoHow much “effort” do you think it would take to build a system that is completely open source down to the firmware?
- djur 4y agoWhy do you have any less trust for what they're doing with your data on their servers versus what they can already do with it on yours? If you don't trust them to have access to your data, you should not use their hardware and you should not use their software.
- yreg 4y agoI believe the firewall is not supposed to be protection against Apple doing an attack on you, but against them collecting data because you forgot to change some setting to opt out somewhere.
- oneplane 4y agoYou actually have to opt in to this, but most people do because they don't care or understand what it is they are doing. In some cases, data shared features have to be re-opted-in during major OS upgrades (maybe because the processes that process the data are divided differently or using different API endpoints.. who knows).
- djur 4y agoIf you don't trust Apple with your data, a firewall will not protect you. They can collect data at any time and have many options for extracting it from your computer. A firewall will only really help with "above the table" behavior.
- yreg 4y agoThat's what I said.