My girlfriend gave me an Alexa assistant as a gift with all good will, since she knows I like technology. I know in terms of privacy it is garbage, however I wonder if there is a safe way to use some functions of this device, perhaps without internet. Some way to hack it or something, do you guys know something about this?

We all know PGP is old and got a myriad of problems, like key management.

Thus, I'm looking for a generic encryption and signing tool that also available on mobile devices, both Android and iOS.

I know age+minisign is the preferred choice but unfortunately there ain't an mobile app for them.

I know Magic Wormhole is great for P2P data transfer but it's slow and not reliable. I often have corrupted files even the size is small. I would much rather encrypt locally, upload to GDrive, and share it.

I know Signal, WhatsApp and other messaging apps now offers E2EE to exchange many data forms but the political sphere is shifting and given the current trend, they might forced to backdoor the protocol, drop E2EE entirely, or cease operation. Something independent from messaging tool is needed.

I'm not seeking perfect forward secrecy as that wasn't achievable for non conversations use case unless parties manually negotiate a session key.

I don't care the web of trust either. Putting PII on a key server for public viewing doesn't fit today's privacy trend.

Nor anonymity. I'm talking to my family members and friends and I don't find a reason to hide that. The only thing matters is the content.

While it will be great to follow some kind of widely used standards, it is not a requirement.

Thanks for the input.

EDIT: Added GPG to the title

What do you guys think about Tuxedo OS from a privacy point of view? Thanks

I hear many people say that the Google Pixel is good for privacy, but is it?

I'm asking this because I find it weird, of all the companies, Google having the most “privacy”.

uninstall Apple Store, which comes pre-installed in iOS, to stop getting these notifications

edited post. The original description & title was me complaining about this notification thinking it was default behavior of iOS, not knowing it came from the Apple Store

I'm not sure if this is strictly privacy or more security related but it does affect iOS and Android and could have privacy implications. It was enough to make me to turn off 2G anyway.

Summary

• A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit challenging a rule that requires visa applicants to disclose their social media accounts to the U.S. government.

• The rule, which went into effect in 2019, applies to visa applicants from all countries.

• The plaintiffs in the lawsuit, two U.S.-based documentary film organizations, argued that the rule violated the First Amendment rights of visa applicants.

• It's unclear if the plaintiffs plan to appeal the ruling.

Additional Details

• The rule requires visa applicants to disclose their social media identifiers, including pseudonymous accounts, for the past five years.

• The plaintiffs argued that the rule would chill free speech and association, as visa applicants would be less likely to express themselves on social media if they knew that the government could see their posts.

• The ruling is a reminder of the challenges faced by people who want to protect their privacy online.

Looking for a note-taking app, preferably that I could use straight from a browser. I’m currently using Standard Notes. Not sure if that one is any good, but E2EE and open-source which at least checks those boxes. I don’t store anything too sensitive and I don’t need a whole bunch of features, though I suppose I’d use them if they were available.

I’m honestly not too picky but maybe discussion here could help someone else out who may be looking for the same thing with higher expectations? I’ll switch over to a better option if there’s something considerably better.

Thanks in advance

Basically title. Looks like wire is now heavily being targeted towards corporates. In a corporate environment you don't need too much privacy, so I was wondering...

Is wire messenger private in 2023?

Where does it stands in the current stack among WhatsApp, signal, simplex etc..?

Exactly how much data is being collected?

I'm talking about things like approximate location, file/album specific media access, system wide camera and mic access, camera/mic use indicator, permission logs, data safety page for apps in play store etc.

Who are they trying to fool here? Any person who is truly aware about privacy knows Google cannot trusted in this domain. I don't believe Google just decided to turn 'not evil' in one night and bring all these additions that actually have any impact on us end users. Google might just as well have the same access to our devices' data if not more and they wouldn't mind letting third party apps have access to it. Operating at such a humongous scale globally, being the lifeline of nearly all individuals and industries and predating off them as their primary source of revenue, they have complete power to ignore or silence the privacy minded individuals like us, yet they bothered to implement and provide us these features.

I cannot come up with any reasonable answer for this apart from what I think of this as some sort of publicity stunt to compare themselves with the privacy features Apple introduced in their softwares. What are your thoughts?

Big techs' have forgotten that social media is for people to interact and connect.

Our data belongs to us, and no one has the right to use it without permission.

I use Element as my Matrix client, but all of the Secure Backup and Cross-Signing buttons confuse me. Does anyone know the difference between pressing Reset instead of Delete Backup for the Secure Backup? Also, how does Cross-Signing share the same key with Secure Backup, or am I mixing something up?

Yo how'd our hommie sideofburritos get old school quick access on GrapheneOS? Is this just an old version? The video's only a year old! So I'm on GOS Android 13 (aka big dumb quick access button purgatory), totally confused and totally jealous. I can only imagine an out of touch board testing a new android version and telling the developers to make the buttons bigger and dumber while they tell their managers "okay, we can do that" while they die a little inside. This is the most egregious design offense committed in the history of AOSP.

Please tell me this can be fixed with System UI Tuner or some other bullshit that doesn't kill my battery life or privacy.

This is not me. I just found the article to be interesting.

Summary

This post discusses personal privacy and security for Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) and their families. The author shares their journey of enhancing safety, which was prompted by a potential breach of their personal life and their wife's celebrity status. They outline a two-phase approach: lockdown and disappearing.

In the lockdown phase, the author secured their digital life by creating an ultra-secure root account, implementing two-factor authentication (2FA) for all accounts, managing SMS and email recovery, and taking various safety measures, including the use of specific tools.

The disappearing phase involves maintaining privacy online by creating different personas for various aspects of life. The author explains how they established these personas, set up prerequisites like virtual credit cards and private mailboxes, and used VOIP services and email forwarding to manage different contact information.

The results of these efforts include increased security through privacy, making it challenging for attackers to target the author. The post also highlights an advanced experiment in purchasing a car anonymously and the importance of being cautious about potential privacy leaks even with careful planning.

Hey everyone, still on the iOS train for the time being, and want to enable 2FA for my Lemmy account. Currently the way this is done, it gives a link and that link default opens in Keychain, however I want to add the token to 2FAS. Anyone know how to do this?

thank you.

Is this some sort of a convenience feature hidden behind a paywall to justify purchasing their subscriptions or does generating the codes actually cost money? If the latter is the case, how do applications like Aegis do it free of cost?

I've been having a look for one but can't find any. Am I missing something obvious?

And what do you actually use? I know the answer is probably self-hosting but maybe there are other solutions for a decent privacy.

For some reason vpns slow it down a lot more than mobile, any privacy focused DNS I can use?

Hello, I try to keep my Debian laptop as private as possible, but for work, I need to use Windows software, so I run a VirtualBox with Windows 11. My PC runs smoothly without any issues, but I need to access my specific hardware USB ports, and it doesn't recognize them. I read that I need to install the Extension Pack, so I downloaded it, but before installing it, I get a warning message that seems to suggest I'm accepting some risk to my computer. I don't really understand this stuff, so I wanted to ask the following:

Is there any security or privacy risk associated with the VirtualBox Extension Pack?

Is there any other way to access my USB-C devices without installing it? (I've already tried selecting USB 2.0 and 3.0, but the list shows "no device available").

Thank you very much to whoever responds.

PS: Also I found this on the Internet: "The user agreement VirtualBox extension pack states of sharing a user’s data to the US govt. including the hardware information and so on. Does it make sense even if I use Tails/Whonix for anonymity?" :-/

https://privacytests.org rate Brave as the best browser.