Hacker News Reader

Comment by autoexec | Hacker News Reader

People should really just assume every scrap of data they input into their phones is being sent to at least one company who will happily sell it to anyone who asks. Never use your phone for anything you wouldn't be happy with being publicly known and associated with you forever.

That's not what our devices should be, but that's the reality we live in. These devices aren't for us, they are to enable other companies to use us.

View on HN

Devices made for us are coming, some time early next year.

Purism Librem 5: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/

Pinephone: https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/

They're coming every year, and yet here we are.

Don't be so bummed out sounding. I'm sure we'll solve it as soon as we get a good year of Linux on the desktop.

It's been a pretty good year so far, for me anyway. I'm hoping Android soon joins my pile of "never again" software.

Linux on the desktop is pretty good. YoLotD may have already happened, IMO.

Now that Steam, WINE, and Proton are working reasonably well on a couple of major Linux platforms (Fedora, Ubuntu, and the Arch folks), there really isn't anything my Linux desktop can't do; gaming was the only holdout and that's mostly solved.

Graphics drivers, like the open AMD drivers and Nvidia's binary blob, are decent too.

> People should really just assume every scrap of data they input into their phones is being sent to at least one company who will happily sell it to anyone who asks.

There are a number of apps that don’t let this information leave your device at all, or end-to-end encrypt it. You just have to find them.

And then hope they don't get new management.

Don't hope. Don't guess. Use apps from F-Droid. There is still a risk at the app level but it is much lower. On iOS, there is no such thing so you can't do that.

At the phone level, there are still opaque binary blobs, so don't trust blindly.

While true, assuming that they could access and sell your data if they wanted to is still a good rule to follow, as it'll make you more cautious.

Just wait till someone with very deep pockets buys them.

i.e WhatsApp

WhatsApp isn't compromised though, regardless of its parent entity. They'd rather have the user base not generating data for anyone than an independent WhatsApp.

Facebook has, in fact, used WhatsApp data to improve the Facebook connectivity graph. They haven’t messed with the actual message texts. Yet.

Bad example. Facebook purchased WhatsApp in 2014. WhatsApp introduced end-to-end encryption by default in 2016.

You could extend this advice to anything with a CPU and a network connection: TVs, tablets, e-readers, smart watches/fitness trackers, cars, printers, smart home devices etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com