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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • For Apple, privacy means restricting access to your data for third parties. They take it for granted that they themselves should have access to everything. Apple protects your privacy from third parties, but not from Apple. In that regard, they actively compromise your privacy, because they upload and keep a lot more of user data on their servers than one would expect, and are semitransparent about that at best.

    Of course the same is true for google, plus google makes more money with ads and owns a lot more of “internet infrastructure”: For Apple, they have control over your OS and maybe browser. Google owns the OS, your browser, the DNS server, the search, the cached version of a website, the captiveportalcheck server, maybe even the domain register and hosting provider. Apple has targeted apps as well, but the pure scale of what google is doing makes it so much worse in that regard.

    The same is true for manufacturers like Samsung, Huawei etc. as well, they too want as much of your data, and want other parties to get as little, as possible. That’s just what’s happening across the industry: data is the new gold, the fewer parties have access to a certain set of data the higher its value.

    Very simply put:

    IPhone -> Apple tries to get all your data, but restrict access for third parties

    Stock Android -> Google and manufacturer x try to get all your data, but restrict access for fourth parties

    Then there are Linux phones, probably great for privacy but honestly not practical at the current state. And then there are custom roms like LineageOS, grapheneos etc. That’s where I always land, because I want actual privacy including from the maker of my device. Also, clean LineageOS on a well supported device is just miles ahead of any stock android rom if you ask me. But if I did not have the time or skill to flash custom roms I could totally see me buying an iPhone. I won’t, because lineage, but you get the point.

    Tl,Dr: Get LineageOS or GrapheneOS. If you can’t or don’t want to: IPhone might be slightly better in terms of privacy.

    Sorry for the wall of text, hope it helps someone!



  • I’m so torn about valve. It is after all a proprietary platform. I use it since always and have hundreds of games and just know they’ll all be gone at some point in the future. No word about making steam client open source, not even talking about something like decentralized proof of ownership etc. (For obvious reasons)

    That said: they do incredible work for Linux. Their games have been Linux compatible since ages! And actually play well on Linux. Their client works flawlessly. And what they have done with proton is just flat out incredible. As you say Linux gaming is awesome currently and has not been that exciting for a long time. In short they do awesome work, I’d just wish they were a little bit open sourceier.