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.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
My setup on GrapheneOS with all the exploit protections on except some off for apps with compatibility issues. Thoughts?
Pro tip. If you go to an apps notification settings, then set a category to silenced and option called "minimize" should show up which allows the notification to be hidden from the notification bar, but shown in the drawer
Oh that's very cool, I didn't know that. Although I think it isn't the most useful for me since I don't have lockscreen notifications and I have all my apps on the home screen
It doesn't bother you to see mullvard in the top all the time?
Quite the opposite, I rather be up there so I see it's running. Altough not that it matters much since I have a killswitch
chrome could be firefox. much better, and no effort at all to switch.
bonus for using ublock origin and never seeing ads again.
Firefox is not secure on mobile, Vanadium is a great browser made by the GrapheneOS devs
Firefox is not secure on mobile
Can you elaborate?
I'm on the go right now. This is a quote for an old privacy guides snapshot, but when I was looking for it, I saw some articles from April saying that this was no longer true, so further searching needed when I get home
On Android, Firefox is still less secure than Chromium-based alternatives: Mozilla's engine, GeckoView, has yet to support site isolation or enable isolatedProcess.
People in the comments already have "Avoid Gecko-based browsers like Firefox as they’re currently much more vulnerable to exploitation and inherently add a huge amount of attack surface. Gecko doesn’t have a WebView implementation (GeckoView is not a WebView implementation), so it has to be used alongside the Chromium-based WebView rather than instead of Chromium, which means having the remote attack surface of two separate browser engines instead of only one. Firefox / Gecko also bypass or cripple a fair bit of the upstream and GrapheneOS hardening work for apps. Worst of all, Firefox does not have internal sandboxing on Android."
Oh, i didn't know it was a fork. I'd take adblock over it though, just for the fact it blocks rogue malicious javascript along with ads.
I generally recommend Firefox for people that don't use it, but there are more secure forks too if that's your jam.
I mean Gecko based browsers are actively recommended against on mobile. Chromium based browsers are recommended. Also I use mullvadVPN DNS based ad blocking, and I also have Brave that has built in ad blocking. Do yourself a favor and ditch adblock in favor of Ublock origin
never heard of it. by whom? for what reason?
I haven't really dived into this but I'm pretty sure GOS dev are one of the groups to recommend against it
Completely out of topic but,
I just noticed that this post has more comments than upvoted
🤣
Some apps that you use are not safe. Aurora store doesnt send too much data to google but it doesnt verify app signatures which can lead to installing malicious apps, use normal play store instead which verifies app signatures (its also suggested to use by grapheneos devs). Whatsapp, collects data about you. Cromite, uses adblock plus which is really bad. Also here is another reason why cromite is bad:
“Cromite has very problematic changes included which substantially reduce privacy and security. It reduces security more than it improves it. For example, it includes the highly problematic Eyeo filtering engine from the company behind Acceptable Ads, Adblock Plus, etc. which took over the forked uBlock extension misleading people with the name pretending to be the uBlock Origin project among other extensions. Eyeo’s C++ code is low quality and has memory corruption issues… Cromite including the incredibly sketchy Eyeo content filtering engine and stuff like additional codecs goes against what we’re trying to achieve. We also don’t think the randomization-based anti-fingerprinting approach works, among other issues”.
"Casually reminds you that Ironfox exists & it's a lot more "private" than most chromium-based browsers, & has ublock origin. (slow by default tho)
also while aurora store doesn't verifies signatures, is has Exodus integrated which dynamically analyses & warns about spyware, tracks and telemetry so you more caucious about the littered "free" apps...
Yes, ironfox is good too (i forgot to mention it) but on grapheneos you will want to end up using their browser
Avoid Gecko-based browsers like Firefox as they're currently much more vulnerable to exploitation and inherently add a huge amount of attack surface. Gecko doesn't have a WebView implementation (GeckoView is not a WebView implementation), so it has to be used alongside the Chromium-based WebView rather than instead of Chromium, which means having the remote attack surface of two separate browser engines instead of only one. Firefox / Gecko also bypass or cripple a fair bit of the upstream and GrapheneOS hardening work for apps. Worst of all, Firefox does not have internal sandboxing on Android. This is despite the fact that Chromium semantic sandbox layer on Android is implemented via the OS isolatedProcess feature, which is a very easy to use boolean property for app service processes to provide strong isolation with only the ability to communicate with the app running them via the standard service API. Even in the desktop version, Firefox's sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux) and lacks full support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole. The sandbox has been gradually improving on the desktop but it isn't happening for their Android browser yet.
Also, having exodus integration in app downloader is good but not worth it for exchange of no signature verification, so it's better to just check it in browser instead or use their app to check trackers
Cool, especially more so on PWA.
But I'd still recommend having ironfox for general browsing & not throwing privacy to the window.
(You won't believe it but, I just wrote a blog-size reply and accidently deleted it for trying to put it on a pastebin service...)
Are those green mini icons an indication of a PWA shortcut?
I use the app Hermit to run isolated websites, usually as PWAs. It's replaced quite a few apps, but I've noticed that many companies are intentionally making their web experience shit so they force you to use invasive apps.
Anyway, it can create home icons for those sites, and they run separately (i.e. in your task switcher), so it works better than browser shortcuts.
Keep what's app and any Aurora store style apps inside the Private Space section. Then keep it locked when not in use
KeePassDX, nice choice! I really wish I could have DX or XC on both phone and desktop. Love both but would prefer to donate to one. Wallet is unhappy but I really try to donate to all FOSS apps I use...