Privacy Guides
In the digital age, protecting your personal information might seem like an impossible task. We’re here to help.
This is a community for sharing news about privacy, posting information about cool privacy tools and services, and getting advice about your privacy journey.
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Check out our website at privacyguides.org before asking your questions here. We've tried answering the common questions and recommendations there!
Want to get involved? The website is open-source on GitHub, and your help would be appreciated!
This community is the "official" Privacy Guides community on Lemmy, which can be verified here. Other "Privacy Guides" communities on other Lemmy servers are not moderated by this team or associated with the website.
Moderation Rules:
- We prefer posting about open-source software whenever possible.
- This is not the place for self-promotion if you are not listed on privacyguides.org. If you want to be listed, make a suggestion on our forum first.
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- News posts must be related to privacy and security, and your post title must match the article headline exactly. Do not editorialize titles, you can post your opinions in the post body or a comment.
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- Do not post about VPNs or cryptocurrencies which are not listed on privacyguides.org. See Rule 2 for info on adding new recommendations to the website.
- General guides or software lists are not permitted. Original sources and research about specific topics are allowed as long as they are high quality and factual. We are not providing a platform for poorly-vetted, out-of-date or conflicting recommendations.
Additional Resources:
- EFF: Surveillance Self-Defense
- Consumer Reports Security Planner
- Jonah Aragon (YouTube)
- r/Privacy
- Big Ass Data Broker Opt-Out List
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EDIT: LONG POST, my opinion are backed on years of interest in the topics as well as first hand experience.
I'll go Windows x Android first:
Windows is a privacy nightmare. You can try and fight it but you can and will break things along the way. So I'll basically advise you to use anything else.
Android in the other hand has some options to flash custom ROMs and thus you can change what's running. But you're stuck with /e/ OS if you want real privacy without giving up on almost everything Google, banking apps, etc. There are other Android forks but most of them focus on security, features, gimmicks, etc. So at least there you have a good amount of control. You can use Android with KDE Connect for actually good cross device features in my personal opinion.
macOS iOS:
These are fully controlled by Apple. Sure, Apple goes hard against 3RD PARTY tracking, but does not tell you you need to switch off 1st party tracking within multiple settings pages (own experience). There have been some reports about macOS sending hashes of photos from a local account with no iCloud login, but that was fixed quickly, even though I've been skeptical. But this video by Techlore actually explains things really good.
MY conclusion?
I'd say the most private would be Android x Linux with KDE Connect.
2nd place is iOS with proper settings x Linux with KDE Connect. (For real, this tool gets you cool cross device sync.)
3rd place would be iOS x macOS both on privacy friendly settings if you, like me, rely on proprietary stuff. Xcode and iOS development can only be done on macOS and thus I'll stick to this combo. Fedora will always have a special place in my heart and on my SSD though.
So which level of these you want to pick definitely come down to how much you rely on what software and what you can afford. I hope I could help.
Besides /e/ os, I would also recommend graphene and calyxos.
Calyxos works similar to /e/os in that it uses microg to get things working, but calyxos is more up-to-date and secure.
Graphene os uses sandboxed Google play, which sounds bad, but the play services is confined to its sandbox, basically graphene os will simply feed it garbage telemetry unless it is absolutely necessary for the system to function.
/e/ os supports more devices (not just pixel like the other two), have their own SSO cloud service based on Nextcloud, and they support device that is outside of the support period of manufacturer (this also hurts security, as firmware cannot be updated without the OEM supporting the phone). But there is always a trade-off between security and longevity, given that most OEM only support a phone for couple of years now.