5mo ago

Should Mozilla be trusted?

news.ycombinator.com

Mozilla deletes promise to never sell Firefox data | Hacker News

Mozilla deletes promise to never sell Firefox data.

22 comments

Not to be a doomer, but it feels like the skill floor to protecting my privacy is unbearably high and getting higher. Does anyone have a good resource about it?
- https://www.privacyguides.org/en/
  
  Just do one thing at a time. Here's my general process:
  switch email, and forward everything from the old one to the new one (I use my own domain name, but paid hosting)
  get into self-hosting, and slowly replace services I use w/ self-hosted ones
  get friends and family to switch to privacy-friendly services to communicate w/ me
  And so on. Just do one thing at a time, and continue until you're happy with it.
- Rifles.
  
  I have to ask: what are you going to do? Shoot Facebook? Snipe iCloud?
  Start blasting Google?
  Pretty sure a rifle is in no way a useful tool for any sort of online privacy.
  
  Not very private to put your name on a government list of gun owners.
No, mostly because the main tenet of data security is that nobody should ever be trusted - not fully, at least.
- I believe it's phrased, Trust AND Verify.
  
  Trust but verify, if you're using the Russian axiom.
- I suspect the codebase for modern browsers has gotten so incredibly complex that it's become difficult to audit for most people. But you're right
TL;DR - No trust. None. For anyone or anything.
Extreme you say? Sure, maybe. But we've been burned so many times, yet we still say things like "oh but its convenient". That simply means most people dont care or dont have the time to deal with it, which is fair.
I don't blame them, in this day and age, we have PLENTY to worry about, other than our online privacy and anonimity.
Personally, I've went with the scorched earth approach. Foss, privacy respecting, self-hosted, encrypted. If I don't have control of it, I will keep it in a different place than the things I have control over.
Unfortunately, for most, this comes at a very large technical overhead. Frankly, I don't see other ways forward. Look at france, sweeden, UK, they all want backdoors and the encryption keys to everything.
The way forward will be trustless, self-hosted services. The next steps are to simply lower the technical bar, because even as a skilled engineer, sometines I hit my head against things that need a serious amount of figuring out.
Making these services easy to host and use would be amazing. Trust nothing.
you should always use internet with zero trust

22 comments