Just a heads up for those who are using GrapheneOS. If you log into 2 (google or other) accounts on an installed app even on different profile, the service provider will still be able to link between your 2 accounts using MediaDRM. (Google will still know that both of the 2 accounts have been logged in on the same device)

More info:

• https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/18315-how-can-an-app-identify-that-it-was-reinstalled-on-the-same-device
• https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/9023-mediadrm-identifier

Food for thought.

https://youtu.be/dpE3feBwHCM

I got a new phone number last year. The last person who owned this number just left all her accounts tied to this number and one by one I've been reaching out to the places tied to it telling them they have the wrong number and to stop using this one. Simple enough.

But there is one company that refuses to stop using this number. Wynhdam hotels absolutely refuses to do anything about this. They keep sending me notifications and check in confirmations for her hotel visits. Using just the texts they send me, I know her full name, email address, home address, her reservations at the hotel, which hotel she's going to and what days. Using past conversations with the other hotels she's been to (called in to tell them to stop this months ago), I know she's been kicked out for making a scene in the lobby or something. Looking online, I see she has a criminal record, and a history of child custody losses, drug abuse, and is apparently an "experienced college girl" on an escort site.

In my most recent calls with wyndham, they told me that they can't change the number out. I will need to contact this charming person and have her do it. I am absolutely not getting involved in that mess in any capacity. I'm still telling her johns and dealers this is the wrong number.

Once I explained to the call center supervisor I was escalated to this has gone on long enough and I'm willing to let an attorney deal with it, they put me on hold and supposedly took my number off the account. But the next day, I get another notification. It seems she is providing her services again and it's still making that my problem. So I call and get routed to a promotional department that said they have no idea why they got this call, but I should probably just sue.

I tried calling the number listed on the confirmation texts but it goes to a dead end line that just asks for a remote access code and then hangs up, so I can't ask the hotel she is actually at flag her down and say "hey, you need to update your number."

I emailed their privacy department yesterday but the notifications are still coming in. I can't change my phone number at the moment as I'm dealing with some delicate matters that are tied to this number so I can't risk changing the number at this time.

How can I get wyndham to take this seriously? This is a dangerous amount of information I was able to get off a recurring text they know is going to the wrong place.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_Lxkt50xOg

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/32032383

cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/215685

WhatsApp can now call on Meta AI to summarize your personal chats. As shown in a GIF, you can access it by tapping the button to unfurl all of your unread messages in a chat. But instead of showing your messages, WhatsApp uses Meta AI to generate a bulleted summary of what you missed.

The feature is rolling out in English in the US, with plans to launch in more countries and languages later this year. It uses Meta’s Private Processing technology, which the company claims will prevent it and other third parties from snooping on your messages.

WhatsApp, which is owned by Meta, says its AI message summaries are optional, and the feature is turned off by default. You can also use WhatsApp’s “Advanced Privacy” setting to prevent users from using AI features in group chats.  We still don’t know if WhatsApp’s AI message summaries will struggle with accuracy, which is something we saw with the launch of Apple’s AI-generated message and notification rundowns.

Over the past year, Meta has continued stuffing different AI features into WhatsApp, including a way to ask Meta AI questions from within a chat, as well as a feature that generates images in real-time. Some users have grown frustrated by the new Meta AI button in the bottom-right corner of the app that they can’t turn off or remove. Meta also sparked backlash with another change that brought ads to the app — something its founders said they never wanted to do.

The app’s Private Processing is supposed to conceal your interactions with its AI model by creating a “secure cloud environment,” preventing Meta or WhatsApp from seeing your summaries. Other people in the group chat won’t be able to see the message summaries, either.

From The Verge via this RSS feed

I'm considering finally jumping off gmail. I'm not going to host my own email since I just don't have the skill to secure that thing well enough myself. Any mail server I set up would become a botnest within hours. So that has me looking at third party stuff.

Proton has a mostly good reputation, though their CEO's twitter post a while back praising the Trump regime makes me question if I should trust them with anything. I don't know enough about the entire situation to know if its just internet drama or a real concern, but anything involving Trump is a huge red flag for me.

Tuta looks pretty nice but I've read there are concerns about it being in a country that's part of the 14 eyes collaboration, so it might not matter what the organization wants if the government of the region they are in says fuck off and do what we tell you.

On the lower end of concerns, I am in the Apple ecosystem. (boo hiss I know). I like the clean and simple built in apps like email and calendar and how the notifications all work across my watch, phone, mac and homepods. I like how safari can just jump in and throw an email alias at things for me. I like how all my stuff is managed. But I also know Apple could piss me off at any moment and make wild sweeping changes I might not like, so relying on them too much could screw me over someday. I dont know, right now I really like their setup but portability does seem to matter more ultimately so this switch does seem like a better idea in the long run, even if I'm giving up features I may enjoy.

What are your opinions on the privacy email and calendar services in 2025? Should I even both with a cloud based calendar in the first place?

Psylo, which bills itself as a new kind of private web browser, debuted last Tuesday in Apple’s App Store, one day ahead of a report warning about the widespread use of browser fingerprinting for ad tracking and targeting.

It was a fortuitous coincidence.

Psylo for iOS and iPadOS was created by Mysk, a Canada-based app biz run by software developers and security researchers Talal Haj Bakry and Tommy Mysk.

“Psylo stands out as it is the only WebKit-based iOS browser that truly isolates tabs,” Tommy Mysk told The Register. "It’s not only about separate storage and cookies. Psylo goes beyond that.

“This is why we call tabs ‘silos.’ It applies unique anti-fingerprinting measures per silo, such as canvas randomization. This way two Psylo tabs opening the same website would appear as though they originated on two different devices to the opened website.”

I am trying to get away from Google and am looking for a decent cloud service that's integrated well into Linux, either by itself or by using rclone.

I tried Proton drive, but it is laggy and overall not very good.

I just need storage, nothing fancy. Self hosting is not an option tough, at this time.

EDIT: I don't want to write the same answer 15 times, so I'll just put this here: Thanks a lot for the recommendations to all of you! I've got some reading up to do now :-)

Could Windows and installed apps upload all my personal files?

Dear all

I have deleted Onedrive and disabled File system access in Privacy.

1. I would like to know, which other ways that my personal files could be uploaded in a non-malicious non-hacker way?
2. Just by using Windows, Microsoft could upload all my personal files to themselves if they would?
3. Does every installed App / software have full access to my whole drive? How can I found out, how much access it has?

Thank you for your interest and reply

Best regards

@Rikudou_Sage@lemmy.world

Yes, every application has access to everything. The only exception are those weird apps that use the universal framework or whatever that thing is called, those need to ask for permissions. But most of the apps on your PC have full access to everything.

And Windows does collect and upload a lot of personal information and they could easily upload everything on your system. The same of course applies for the apps as well, they have access to everything except privileged folders (those usually don’t contain your personal data, but system files).

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/31889138

Please see the cross-post as it is updated.

Is there a firefox extension that disable the web connection of other extensions?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/31889138

Please see the cross-post as it is updated.

What is the difference between Chameleon and JShelter?

• Chameleon – Get this Extension for 🦊 Firefox Android (en-US)
  • Chameleon is a WebExtension port of the popular Firefox addon Random Agent Spoofer.
• JShelter – Get this Extension for 🦊 Firefox Android (en-US)
  • JShelter is a browser extension to give back control over what your browser is doing. A JavaScript-enabled web page can access much of the browser's functionality, with little control over this process available to the user: malicious websites can uniquely identify you through fingerprinting and use other tactics for tracking your activity. JShelter aims to improve the privacy and security of your web browsing.
  • Like a firewall that controls network connections, JShelter controls the APIs provided by the browser, restricting the data that they gather and send out to websites. JShelter adds a safety layer that allows the user to choose if a certain action should be forbidden on a site, or if it should be allowed with restrictions, such as reducing the precision of geolocation to the city area. This layer can also aid as a countermeasure against attacks targeting the browser, operating system or hardware.

JShelter seems to spoof info by controls the APIs provided by the browser? and Chameleon spoofs user agent and many other information.

To me both seems to serves the same purpose of spoofing. Is Chameleon spoofing without interfering with js and JShelter spoofing with interfering with js the main difference between them? In addition JShelter seems to be able to block malicious js

How JShelter and Chameleon achieves spoofing differently?

https://sereneblue.github.io/chameleon/

strongly recommend

How can a site see what extensions you have?

One of the things I've seen mentioned before is that installing too many extensions can make you more unique, and thus have a negative influence on your fingerprint. This got me curious, how exactly do sites detect which extensions you have anyway? Can they outright read your list of extensions?

Furthermore, do all extensions make you more unique? I guess the answer would depend on the answer to the first question (surely, if they can just outright see your list, then the answer would be yes), but lets say you install something that seems rather innocuous, like Transparent Standalone Images, for example. Can a site see that this is installed / does it make your fingerprint more unique?

explanation

Web sites do not have any way to enumerate or query your installed extensions, and they cannot directly "see" the content scripts injected by extensions. However, some extensions do modify pages in a way that scripts in the page could recognize as being the work of a particular extension, assuming the owners of the site care to research and check for such things.

One particular issue is that an extension may insert a path into the document to a page or image in the extension itself. Firefox assigns a randomized UUID to the extension at install time, and the path uses this UUID. On the plus side, this may prevent the site from associating the URL with a specific extension. On the minus side, at least in theory, a site could detect this weird URL in the page and use that for fingerprinting. See: How to prevent fingerprinting via Add-on UUID?.

is there anything else that I should notice?

Thank you!

Answered by @listless@lemmy.cringecollective.io

Web pages are not allowed to list your extensions. They can indirectly surmise you have certain extensions based on how your requests differ from expectations. For example, if they have advertisements, but your browser never actually makes any requests to load the images, CSS, JS or HTML for the advertisements, they can deduce you have an ad-blocker. That’s a datapoint they now have to ID you: “has an ad-blocker”

Now let’s say they have an ad they know AdBlockPlus allows, but uBlock Origin doesn’t. They see your browser doesn’t load that ad. Another datapoint: “Not using AdBlockPlus”.

Based on what requests go back and forth between your browser and their servers, they map out a unique fingerprint.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/31882019

Memo says cybersecurity office deemed WhatsApp a high risk due to ‘lack of transparency in how it protects user data’

As a security-conscious user, I've used NoScript since Firefox's early days, but its restrictive nature has become frustrating. I'm often forced to go unprotected just to access websites with multiple scripts running on different domains, which defeats the purpose of using NoScript and balances security and usability that it once provided.

Is there a way to block browser JavaScript from executing commands that retrieve sensitive information from my local machine, while still allowing JavaScript that is only used for rendering web pages?

by sensitive information I'm referring to

• local machine time
• local machine ram
• local machine operating system + version
• local machine hardware
• Serial Number
• Hardware ID
• UUID
• Windows Device ID
• Windows Product ID
• ...

greatly appreciate any insight

EDIT:

could be possible solution

https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/16025-vanadium-and-what-to-use-on-desktop/19

• ~~LibreJS: GNU LibreJS aims to address the JavaScript problem described in Richard Stallman's article The JavaScript Trap.~~
• JShelter: Mitigates potential threats from JavaScript, including fingerprinting, tracking, and data collection. Slightly modifies the results of API calls, differently on different domains, so that the cross-site fingerprint is not stable. Applies security counter-measures that are likely not to break web pages. Allows fine-grained control over the restrictions and counter-measures applied to each domain.

@bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de

Most of those things cannot be collected through JavaScript.

Local time can.

RAM can only be approximated to protect user privacy. Edit: And it’s not available on Firefox.

OS+version are already in your browser’s user-agent string that is sent out with every request you make.

Machine hardware cannot be enumerated. JavaScript can try to guess your GPU based on what it can do with WebGL.

There is no way to get a serial number or similar.

To spoof timezone/OS+version/browser+version ... and disable WebGL, use https://sereneblue.github.io/chameleon/

• https://lemmy.world/post/31885153

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/457134

Comments

Both auto-forwarding and auto-reply are paid features, which makes cancelling & switching much more difficult. Gmail is a breeze comparatively. I highly recommend against using their addresses (e.g. protonmail.com, proton.me, pm.me)

Email forwarding is available for everyone with a paid Proton Mail plan.

(source)

I've had people tell me that this is (their words, not mine): "mental illness"

https://kevinboone.me/lineageos-degoogled.html

In an earlier article I wrote about my attempts to remove all trace of Google from my life. Part of that process, which is still ongoing, was to install Lineage OS on all my Android cellphones and tablets, replacing the original, vendor firmware. Doing this removes the egregious Google Play Services although, of course, this severely limits my ability to run Android apps. That’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make, although not without some regrets.

I’ve subsequently learned that hard-core de-Googlers eschew Lineage OS, because it remains too close to the stock configuration of the Android Open-Source Project (AOSP) on which it is based. There are certainly smartphone ROMs, like GrapheneOS, that are even more Google-free.

But I’ve grown to like Lineage. I don’t know what kind of future it has, but it works well for me, and it’s easy – as easy as can be expected – to install on all the devices I own. Installing and setting up Lineage is fiddly enough; I don’t want to make my life even more complicated, if I don’t have to.

Those of us who are divorcing Google worry most, I think, about Google’s intrusive data collection. Of course, Google is by no means the only business that engages in such practices – “surveillance capitalism” is big business. But Google presents a unique challenge because, not only does it collect a lot of data, it has a lot of clever ways to process it, and find connections between disparate data elements. Before my Google separation, it always amazed me how Google seemed to know where I was all the time, even with location services disabled on my smartphone. And Google’s advertisers seem to know what I’ve been shopping for, even when I’ve been doing my shopping in person at retail outlets. How Google does this, I don’t know; but I do want to reduce their opportunities to do so.

So I need to know what information my cellphone is sending to Google, even having removed all proprietary Google stuff.

I have to point out that I’m not talking about additional, 3rd-party apps that I might have installed on a Lineage OS device – all apps have the potential to create privacy problems, but I’m free not to use them. Here I’m just thinking about the platform itself.

Note
I run Lineage with no Google apps or services of any kind. If you do run Google services, you have to accept that absolutely everything you do with an Android device will be known to Google. There’s simply no point worrying about the trivial privacy breaches in this article – that would be like taking a cyanide pill and then worrying about your ingrown toenail.

In this article I’ll be describing various data leaks of which Lineage OS has frequently been accused, reporting which ones seem still to be present, and suggesting (well, guessing) how serious they might be.

The captive portal test

“Captive portals” are often found in hotels and entertainment venues. In a captive portal, all Internet traffic gets directed to the venue’s network filter, which ensures that the user has paid for a service or, at least, consented to some usage agreement.

Android performs a captive portal test every time the device enables a network connection. This test is a simple HTTP or HTTPS request on some publicly-accessible webserver. The request is expected to return a success (2XX) code if the server is reachable. In a captive portal, the service-providing organization will capture the HTTP(S) request, and return a redirection code to its own webserver. This server will provide a web page with further instructions.

By default Lineage OS uses Google’s webservers for the captive portal test. This means that Google knows every time a device raises a network connection.

Is this a problem? Google doesn’t get to find out anything except the IP number of the device, some limited information about the type of device, and the time of day. I’ve looked at the source code, and I don’t see any information other than this being sent – the code just uses the standard Java HTTP support to make the request. It’s plausible that, with a wide-area connection, the carrier might add additional information to the request, and Google might be able to infer your location from the IP number.

If you consider this to be too much of a risk, you can change the captive portal connectivity checker. Lineage provides no simple interface for this, but you can do it at the command line (e.g., by running a terminal app, or adb shell). You don’t need to root the phone to do this.

$ settings put global captive_portal_http_url http://my_server 
$ settings put global captive_portal_https_url https://my_server 

Unless you want to disable the captive portal check completely, you’ll need to identify a public webserver that can provide the appropriate response. There are many such servers; some Android replacements that focus more on de-Googling, like GrapheneOS, default to using one of these rather than Google. Even then, they usually have Google’s servers as a fall-back, because an outage of the conectivity check server could otherwise cause serious disruption.

On the whole, I regard this (captive portal check) a relatively harmless breach of privacy. It isn’t telling Google anything they’re not going to find out about in other ways.

DNS

Every time you use a hostname to identify a remote server, there’s going to be a DNS lookup. This lookup translates the hostname into a numeric ID for use with the TCP/IP protocol.

Internet service providers and mobile carriers operate DNS servers, but so does Google. DNS is potentially a privacy problem because the DNS server gets to learn every site you visit. It won’t see the actual URL of a web request – just the hostname. Still, that’s enough information to be concerned about. But it’s worth thinking about who the “you” is in “every site you visit”. To track you, personally, as an individual, the DNS server needs a way to relate your IP number to something that identifies you. There’s no definitive way for Google (or anybody) to do that; but there are statistical methods that can be very effective. They are particularly effective if you happen to use Google’s other services, because these will link a small number of personal Google accounts to an IP number.

Is this a problem for Lineage OS? While it might have been in the past, I don’t think Lineage now uses Google’s DNS, except perhaps as a fallback. Both WiFi and carrier Internet connections are initiated using protocols that can supply a DNS server. On my Lineage devices, I’m sure that these are the DNS servers that are being used. Still, there are references to Google’s DNS server – 8.8.8.8 – in the AOSP source code. So I can’t prove that Google’s DNS will never be used.

If you want, you can supply your own DNS server in the network configuration in the Settings app. But, unless you run your own DNS in the public Internet, you’ll be putting your trust in one mega-corporation or another. I suspect most are less worrying than Google, but perhaps not by much.

By the way – Lineage OS supports encrypted DNS. While that will prevent third-parties from snooping on your DNS traffic – including your mobile carrier or ISP – this won’t protect you from snooping at the DNS server itself. So encrypted DNS is no protection against Google, if you’re using Google’s DNS.

Assisted GPS

It takes a long time for a mobile device to get a robust fix on GPS satellites – a minute in good conditions, or several minutes in a weak signal area. Assisted GPS (A-GPS) primes the satellite fix using environmental data. This data might including a coarse location from a cellular network. With A-GPS, a satellite fix might take only a few seconds.

A-GPS data is processed by a remote server, that has the storage capacity to handle the large amounts of data involved. The main operator of such servers is, again, Google.

What can Google learn about a device using Assisted GPS? As in any Internet operation, it will find the device’s IP number, and it might find the coarse location. The Internet traffic associated with A-GPS can be encrypted but this, again, won’t protect it from Google. To determine the location of a specific individual, Google has to be able to relate the IP number to the individual. As discussed above, that can be done with a reasonable degree of confidence.

On recent Lineage versions, A-GPS is disabled by default. If enabled, it uses Google’s servers – so far as I know there are no widely-available alternatives. I just keep it disabled, and live with the disadvantage of longer GPS start-up times.

Time synchronization, NTP

At one time, Lineage OS used Googles’ time servers to set the time on the device. So far as I know, this is no longer the case – a general pool of NTP servers is used. Even if that were not the case, I can’t worry too much about leaking time synchronizing data.

WebView

I believe that WebView is the most troubling source of privacy concerns for Lineage OS, and the one whose ramifications are the least well-understood.

WebView is a component of Android that renders web pages. Of course, a web browser will do this, but many Android apps and services have a need to render pages without actually being a browser. The ‘captive portal’ support I described above is an example: the device needs to render a page for user to log in or purchase Internet access, even if no web browser is installed.

Lineage OS uses the WebView implementation from the AOSP, which is based on Chromium. Chromium is Google Chrome without the proprietary Google stuff, and it’s undoubtedly less of a privacy concern than Chrome would be. But Chromium, even though it’s open-source, is still primarily a Google product.

There are many known instances where Chromium will provide some user data to Google servers. For example, we know that Chromium downloads lists of ‘unsafe’ websites to support its ‘safe browsing’ feature. This will happen however Chromium is used. When used as a regular web browser, Chromium might send data to Google for its ‘hot word’ detection, for example.

When Chromium is only used to provide a WebView implementation, I’m not convinced that these minor privacy breaches are significant. It’s worth bearing in mind that the Jelly browser that is shipped with Lineage OS is just a wrapper around the Chromium WebView – if you use this browser, you’ll have the same privacy concerns as if you use Chromium itself.

There are a number of Google-free WebView implementations, like Chromite. GrapheneOS uses a WebView implementation called Vanadium, which is essentially a de-Googled Chromium. Installing one of these implementations on Lineage OS is not straightforward, or so it seems to me.

I don’t use Jelly or Chromium itself as a web browser – I install a browser that is not based on Google code, like Firefox. This limits my exposure to Chromium to occasions where WebView is used other than as a browser. In my normal usage, I don’t think there are many of those occasions, so I’m not too worried about WebView.

Nevertheless, it remains a slight concern and, if I could replace it without a lot of effort, I would.

Are we in tinfoil hat territory now?

I don’t like Google knowing so much about me, but I don’t believe Google’s data collection is directly harmful to me. My disapproval of Google’s activities (and I know Google is not the only culprit) is mainly one of principle. I don’t want to be a source of revenue for Google, or to legitimize their behaviour by my own inaction. I don’t want Google to make the Internet more of a hellscape that it currently is.

But I’m not paranoid. I don’t think Google is out to get me, or is in league with people who are. My rejection of Google falls short of doing things that will make my life hugely more difficult.

I am aware, all the same, that I have one foot in tinfoil hat country.

I know a few people – some in my own family – who eschew smartphones because they create time-wasting distractions. I certainly know people who don’t give smartphones to their kids, because of the well-known risks that social media poses to their mental health. But almost nobody avoids Google because they believe, as I do, that the surveillance economy is detrimental to society in the long term. Even those few who do believe this are mostly not willing to take action, because they believe (or convince themselves) that the benefits of a connected world outweigh the costs of a total lack of privacy. For me that’s like understanding the risks of climate change, and yet choosing to run two or three gas-guzzling cars because it’s a half-mile walk to the shops.

The few people who do believe as I do, and are willing to act on their beliefs, tend to be people who also believe that they’re being monitored by the CIA, or that Covid vaccines are implanting mind-control receivers. That’s not a gang that I want to run with.

On the whole, I’m satisfied that Lineage OS, as I use it, is preventing nearly all of Google’s data collection. I don’t install or use any Google services, I don’t enable A-GPS, I don’t use Chromium or the built-in browser. I could eliminate more arcane aspects of data collection – like the Internet connectivity check – if I wanted to take the trouble.

I don’t think that taking reasonable precautions to avoid becoming part of Google’s data collection economy makes me a tinfoil-hatter. Nevertheless, I would probably use GrapheneOS instead, if I had devices that supported it. Ironically, if I wanted to use GrapheneOS, I’d have to buy Google-branded mobile devices, which is an irony that really stings.

So DNS Black-holing is not new obviously, and what stands out as the go to solution? Pihole probably... and yeah thats what im using because hey its a popular choice. Though I am running it in docker. Combining that with Unbound (also in docker), and configuring outbound DNS to use DNS over TLS, with a few additional minor tweaks, but otherwise mostly standard configuration on both.

Wondering what you guys might be using, and if you are using Pihole and/or Unbound if you have any tips on configuration.

Happy to share my config if there is interest.