On privacy and control
toidiu.com153 points by todsacerdoti 10 hours ago
153 points by todsacerdoti 10 hours ago
As much as I'd love to daily drive an OS like GrapheneOS, the risk of running into apps that use Google Integrity API thereby making it impossible to run those apps on Graphene is too much of an inconvenience.
I took a look at this curated list of bank apps[1] supported on Graphene OS and I'm glad that a large majority of them work on Graphene. However, just my luck that one of the banks I use on this list isn't supported.
In my country, the state is enforcing a lot of essential workflows to be digital-first (and in extreme cases digital-exclusive) and I dread to think needing these services at a critical moment and the choice of my OS making it impossible for me. This is more of a commentary on my government's choices but it's a reality for me.
In any case, I don't think it's practical to go cold turkey and switch to a privacy focused phone without testing waters first to see which of your of workflows break and then reason about the tradeoffs/workarounds.
I do admire folks who use GrapheneOS as a daily driver, I'd like to chat them up if I find them in the wild.
https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...
> In my country, the state is enforcing a lot of essential workflows to be digital-first (and in extreme cases digital-exclusive) and I dread to think needing these services at a crticial moment and the choice of my OS making it impossible for me. This is more of a commentary on my government's choices but it's a reality for me.
If my country did this I would get a cheap used device for this purpose and keep it powered off. I refuse to carry a pocket spy for the sake of convenience. I find that it’s rarely an issue.
Another daily GrapheneOS driver here. I've kept banking apps off my phone anyway, and I do banking via desktop/website (I don't understand why people need to do banking 'on the go') and just use a physical credit card for tap payments when I'm out and about.
I do have older Android devices that I have run banking apps on, that I can revert to if necessary, but there's a fair bit of inconvenience I would be happy to endure to avoid being forced into that final option.
What I would recommend is a slow transition, and just start using it at home. If you have GrapheneOS on it's most paranoid settings (exploit protections) there will be exceptions you'll need to allow for a few apps.
It's very country dependent. In the US, I don't think many banks do that, but I heard in Europe this is used a lot more, presumably due to more regulatory bs.
It's worth noting GrapheneOS with the locked bootloader will meet basic integrity, and that's what most apps need anyway. Strong integrity requires a whitelisted OS by Google and hardware to support it, but there are many older devices that do not meet it, so it will likely inconvenience too many people to be enforced for now.
I wonder if it would be feasible to build an automated phone-using robot, and access it remotely for any kind of apps enforcing that type of crap. There is really nothing they can do in terms of device attestation to prevent it.
I worried about that too, but jumped in and it hasn't been an issue at all in two years. Including three bank apps. And it's usually so easy to reset to vanilla Android if you need to that it shouldn't be your moat.
Also, there are almost always alternatives, like the mobile website.
Things like Apple/Google Wallet aren’t significantly superior to a contactless credit/debit card.
About the only bank thing I can think of that actually requires an app is check deposit, which is super rare.
As someone who daily-drives GrapheneOS, there isn't a single app that I want to use that is broken. I don't see any reason to use regular Android.
I run GrapheneOS as a daily driver and slowly removed all proprietary software from my device by looking for FOSS alternatives on F-Droid. Luckily, I'm able to access banking and government in a web browser on a dedicated profile.
I do have a second Android device with a stock ROM that I keep turned off in a drawer in case I ever need to use an app that requires Play Integrity in an emergency.
You're blowing this entirely out of proportion. The vast vast majority of apps work without issue with sandboxed play services. Yes it's less plug and play than a stock os. No it's not a life-ending inconvenience.
Just looked - Microsoft Authenticator doesn't appear to work. I might be able to get off of it but it will take some prep. My banks are supported so that's good.
Why would you use Microsoft Authenticator when there are hundreds of other apps that manage OTPs?
Use aegis https://f-droid.org/packages/com.beemdevelopment.aegis/
Good question. That was for my MS account/licenses and some Azure stuff. I use Google Authenticator for most things.
Thanks for the link, I'll take a look. I might just move it to a secondary device first.
Problem is that if the app that doesn't work is not fungible (see your gym app, your banking app, your community app, etc) then you are out. The best compromise is to have a backup phone for incompatible non-fungible apps
but who says you have to limit yourself to one device? it's mildly inconvenient to carry more than one, sure, but the added benefit of an air gap between "serious business" and "personal life" is very much worth it, imo.
> As much as I'd love to daily drive an OS like GrapheneOS
The Play Integrity shenanigans is mostly on app developers.
That said, good thing GrapheneOS will launch its own Android phone: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/27687-new-manufacturer-theo... / https://piunikaweb.com/2025/10/13/grapheneos-ending-pixel-ex... / https://www.androidauthority.com/grapheneos-phone-wait-or-bu...
Provided GrapheneOS is cleared by Google to launch it as an "Android" device. Given the kind of changes GrapheneOS packs, it may or may not meet Android's mandatory CCD (compatibility) requirements.
> The Play Integrity shenanigans is mostly on app developers.
I completely agree, but as a user I'm the victim of the developers choice.
Is the app the only way to access what you need? I've never once install the app of any bank I've ever used (10ish) and never found myself wishing I had.
Same, mostly, one bank I keep an account at to support Zelle payments which they only offer through their app
An increasing number of new services are app only or have a web interface with basic functionality. Dating apps and banking apps are commonly in this category especially if they are relatively new
I've seen a couple of apps try to use Play Integrity, get blocked by GrapheneOS, and keep on running. Maybe I'm being locked out of something, but it's not something I use anyway.
Note that I don't use banking or government apps. If I bank online it's via the web.
It does seem like a lot of apps continue to function on GrapheneOS after the "Play Integrity" check fails (or at least after Graphene notifies the user that the Play Integrity API has been called). I suspect either:
A) These apps have implemented only the check so far, and will eventually refuse to run or limit functionality at some point in the future.
B) These apps have noted the failure and certain functionality, especially communicating with servers to load "protected" content, will fail even if the app otherwise continues to run.
Agree that "control" is a much better framing, since it doesn't suggest a need for secrecy and therefore embarrassing/unacceptable/untoward behavior that needs to stay behind drawn window blinds. I'm also fond of "agency" and "digital self-sovereignty" as alternatives.
But fine, I'll be the one to say it: Cloudflare isn't one of the good guys here and as an entity it shouldn't be trusted. It doesn't matter how pure their stated motives appear to be now, or how unmarred their track record is so far. It's a corporation that has control over an ever-increasing share of internet infrastructure, and is susceptible to the same risks as any other tech monopolist basket that we all decide to put our eggs in. Maybe more risky than the others, given how deep in the stack its influence is buried.
What happens when a government forces it to NXDOMAIN porn or put nuisance captchas in front of dissident blogs? Is there some reason people think this one is different?
> Cloudflare isn't one of the good guys here
Came here to say the same thing, post was interesting until I got to that point.
> nuisance captchas
Try using the internet outside of the western world and major hubs. Cloudflare make it so painful with captchas and browser integrity checks
This is a case of "When your salary depends on believing one thing, you better believe it.". OP works for Cloudflare and that is blinding his views sadly.
I 100% agree, any entity with a significantly large control of the internet cannot be trusted. And the lower in the stack the smaller the control portion needed for distrust.
> What happens when
Not even this. If you do what OP says on the firefox, and turn on ResistFingerprinting, you'd be seeing many Cloudflare captchas a day. In effect it directly punishes you having any privacy or control. I wonder if they have an internal whitelist for employees? /s
> I would also recommend Bitwarden for those who want a better UI experience.
The newest release of bitwarden absolutely sucks. The images that they're using look AI-generated (specifically, there's some weird stuff around line thickness, colour and shading that, as the spawn of two artists, I do not believe a competent artist/designer would make), but also the images are just pixellated and grainy on my 1080p screen. The design has gone from "clean and usable" to "utterly dogshit", and the response time has gone down the pan.
For domain registration I recommend netim, as they neatly reduced the price that I pay from £30 down to £5, which made a huge difference personally.
> Instead of "privacy" we really should be talking about "control".
Fantastic. This is what I have been shifting towards these past couple years. Hardly anyone likes to be controlled, right?
They are separate but related concerns. Privacy is what you have (or don't have) right now. Control is what you can use to keep or throw it away in the future.
Apple gives you some privacy, better than most Android by default. But it gives you no control. If they decide you don't deserve privacy a year down the line, well, too bad.
I don't but it seems a LOT of people do. They even seem to prefer it.
Control means ownership. Ownership means work.
Until they've been burned by unspoken realities of not owning some piece of their own digital lives, most people will continue to prefer being tenants, rather than owners.
Technology is only the most recent domain in which we can observe the human tendency to prefer the short term, incurious ease and license not to think that tenancy provides over the long term, ongoing work and thorough understanding that ownership demands. To become an owner you need some deeper intrinsically cultivated reason to desire it.
This topic came up at Christmas dinner with family. I had no luck coming up with a reason why they should care.
"Control" would not be a better argument with them. Everything is already controlled. What amazon, google, youtube, facebook, instagram, tiktok, netflix, spotify, recommend to you is all controlled. Various insurance (health, car, etc) is relatively controlled. Through an employeer you usually get health insurance. If you're self or un-employed they require, or did require, extensive health info before they would let you sign up.
And, I'm not entirely sure I disgree with that. Why should my premiums be higher because someone else wants to participate in risky behavior?
Like many here I go though lots of trouble to stay anon. VPNs, multiple unrelated browser profiles, multiple browsers, never use the same email address twice, differnt passwords, etc.... But I can't really think of a truely compelling reason to to give to my family why they should do anything similar.
I can mention things like the girl who's parents discovered she was pregnent when advertisers started sending her baby care ads. But, that's just not relevant to them.
The only thorn in the opine is Cloudflare. Everything looks reasonable but CF. I get that DNS is free, it is OP's employer and registry being offered sans margin but it doesn't make up for the fact that CF is on its way to become the biggest gatekeeper and strangle the freenet if it wishes to do so.
Them being employed by Cloudflare means you should take the article with a grain of salt IMO.
My next low hanging fruit is certainly to make my LLM usage local, my queries contain much more sensitive information than what is mentioned by this post.
In the past I dropped off privacy when it was too inconvenient. For example I dropped protonmail because of bad search, left Linux desktop for Windows due to missing software, etc, I still haven't found the sweet spot for LLMs yet.
For the rest, I'm currently running the full macOS, iOS, safari, Apple passwords and I'm decently happy with this middle ground.
> "I don't need to care about privacy because I have nothing to hide." is an argument that I have heard countless times. I found this argument difficult to counter in the past, yet deep-down I knew the reasoning was flawed.
This one is pretty easy to counter. Just ask the person to hand you their phone and go through their messages and photos. There's no one that wouldn't feel restless about it.
Ask them for their home address.
Ask them for their children's names and the school they go to.
Ask them their mothers maiden name, their first pets name, and they street name they lived on as a child.
Ask to film them going about their job (if they're law enforcement).
Ask them for a copy of their bank statement.
Ask to see their browsing history.
Ask for a key to their house.
I usually ask if they poop with the door closed. We all know what you are doing in there, and we do the same thing. No need to hide.
Or, why do you get your mail in an envelope? I can see that it is your financial statements.
Why do you have curtains on your home? I can go to Zillow and see the interior of your house from years ago.
I think the better argument is (of course, a wrong one), "I trust that big companies won't share my stuff publicly".
I agree. Keeping your data private is just not a big enough motivation. For me though the big issue is making sure one keeps access to their data forever. It’s so easy these days to use everything from one vendor and then get access shut off with no recourse. That is IMO the biggest fear everyone should have these days.
Yes, the only solution is self-hosting and yes it requires being your own sysadmin and it’s hard and not convenient. That’s why I’m building https://github.com/ibizaman/selfhostblocks. It’s a NixOS collection of modules that sets up services that fit well together and have declarative setup for LDAP and SSO. They have integrated backups, https and other features required for self-hosting. Also, the LDAP and SSO setup is tested with e2e NixOS VM tests that use playwright to make sure users can login if they have access.
I’m hoping to lower the bar to self-hosting significantly.
> I have nothing to hide
I really dislike that this is always the argument that's being attacked. It's not even what most people are thinking when they respond.
It's clear that the exchange is privacy for effort. If I want to self host, I need to pay time and money to get it all working, then continue to maintain it forever.
> I use Cloudflare's DNS because I trust them more than other companies; purely based on their business and how their incentives align
The author fails to mention that they are currently working at Cloudflare, I think that should be made clear otherwise I see it as misleading to the reader, like so many pointed it out, Cloudflare is just a corporation like any other corporation out there...
Somewhat related - I want control over devices in my home. Too many things these days need an internet connection to be useful. I run my own OpenWRT router and set up firewall policies for them so they only get the access they need to provide their function. But I'm getting tired of it.
I'm looking for a nice tool that would give me that "control" over my home network -- at the very least, proper observability. Like "little snitch / open snitch" but running on my home router... and I haven't found anything like that yet.
excellent article, you've inspired me to get off Gmail finally (Google's been sending me angry emails about hitting my storage limit for ages anyway).
side note, your link to Tuta is broken - think it's an internal link by accident
What's the story for maps and POI search on GrapheneOS? I'm assuming using Google Maps is a non-starter since that defeats the whole point of all these privacy protections in the first place.
OSMAnd and others can do offline maps and POI search if you want.
You could also run Google Maps web through Tor if needed. Tor is easy to use on Android.
I use organic maps. I also have a seperate user profile that can not run in the background that has Google maps installed and use that sparingly. I've used it once in the last 6 months.
Take a look at CoMaps. It's fully open source with open governance model.
It reached the level of being usable for general population and it improves rapidly due to gained momentum.
Yeah I think most people use Organic Maps or Magic Earth (with the latter being closed and not as privacy-respecting as the former).
> can’t be bothered to host my own email
Never host your own email. It’s a nightmare if legacy systems, edge cases, layered on trust systems, malicious actors, and endless spam. It’s a good way to spend a bunch of time and effort making sure most of your mail never gets delivered.
All of these things mean that email is no longer fit for purpose.
I host a few of my own domain emails using mailu (a system of docker containers), but not my primary (so I'm slightly hypocritical). It's a certain amount of hassle, but as long as you do the SPF and DKIM things, it seems to work pretty well for me (in the limited amount that I use these domains for email).
On the other hand, I've been hosting my own E-mail (exim and dovecot) on a $5 VPS for the past 15 or so years, and it's pretty much set and forget. The most maintenance I have to do is when certbot fails to renew my ssl certificates and I have to manually go in and babysit it, but that's certbot/LetsEncrypt's fault, not the E-mail software. I have maybe had deliverability problems twice in those many years.
This reminds me of the old meme:
> Tech enthusiasts: My entire house is smart.
> Tech workers: The only piece of technology in my house is a printer and I keep a gun next to it so I can shoot it if it makes a noise I don't recognize.
One of my computer science professors from MIT has installed a smart home. I was over for a dinner and he told me a story about how he hit a third-party API rate limit on opening his garage door. Apparently, these things aren't self-hosted for the most part.
I have a pretty deep "smart home" setup and it's all run locally from a laptop in my closet with Home Assistant OS. I have run into 0 limitations. All my devices are kept on their own dedicated Zigbee mesh and/or network separate from my LAN. Only way to communicate in or out is via Tailscale. It's incredibly easy to get started too.
Finally. Someone in the wild that runs passwordstore.org
I thought there was only a couple of us.
A larger percentage of HN users were pass users when HN was less mainstream. Late adopters (of forums, technologies, etc.) tend to be GUI lovers because late adoption and a preference for GUIs are both linked to uninquisitiveness.
FYI: NetGuard is an open source rootless firewall for vanilla Android which also allows per-app network access control, for those unable or unwilling to go with other OSs. Works by leveraging Android VPN to block instead of tunneling packets.
Doesn't running as a VPN mean it's incompatible with running an actual VPN at the same time? That's a pretty big caveat.
Original HN title: "Privacy and control. My tech setup"
Are these artistic spelling choices or are they genuine typos? I feel like I am missing some context here.
Surprised to see Firefox.
Gave it up a while ago, for:
Librefox on the linux device.
Waterfox on the android device.
Orion on the APP£ device.
The average person won’t go through even 2% of the trouble. Your self inflicted lockdown is a niche within a niche. I respect it though!
Who cares what the average person will go through and do though? We’re each responsible for ourselves and how we choose to go about life, even if vastly differs from the general population.
Ironically, if your setup is too niche (e.g. browsing privacy configuration) you can be easily tracked, though no one will bother, but captcha's will certainly not miss you.
This is the rub, tech is able to track you based on your browser, viewport size, os, location (a vpn still has a location if you aren’t rotating) and more. I use Firefox for privacy and just that measure alone rules out 97% of internet traffic and zeros down who I am within 3%. How private am I if I default to that 3%. 1440p monitor and a half screen Firefox viewport? Now we’re building an advertising profile!
my privacy setup is good -- JS whitelisting and blocking of most ads but my fingerprint sticks out like a sore thumb. (firefox or bust baby)
Your browser fingerprint should be unique, it should just be unique every time.
The ad blocker is uBlock Origin ... the blog misstates it as uOrigin.
> Domain: I switched to Cloudflare Registrar recently because they offered a lower price ... I don't think Cloudflare really cares to make money on domain registration.
Well, they don't today.
Speaking of "control", it is bad form to keep both the nameservers and registrar with the same company (think takedown requests / account lockout / etc).
> I use Cloudflare's DNS because I trust them more than other companies; purely based on their business and how their incentives align
It's a very naive way of thinking about some businesses. What did Cloudflare do to earn this trust? It's just another VC-backed company and 1.1.1.1 is a free service. So Cloudflare is going to lose money just to protect my privacy? I don't think so.
> What did Cloudflare do to earn this trust?
dude who wrote the article works for Cloudflare. I'd say receiving a paycheck is a pretty good way to earn trust
It's just DNS. I'd say using cloudflare DNS is a step up from whatever the ISP's default DNS is. But if you're hawkish on Cloudflare, just use something else. There are plenty of good options
the conversation about what a privacy enhanced way of relating to tech is hasn't really matured much.
on one hand its being relative to a list of specific threat actors you avoid. on the other, its maintaining a role with leverage vs your devices and services.
privacy doesnt catch on as product because you have to navigate an inferior relationship to those threat actors first, and nobody aspires to that unless they already have a kind of alt cyberpunk underdog mentality and attitude.
the non-punk or normal, leveraged position is like a business or first class lounge for tech. calm, negotiable, amenable, hidden and exclusive power, craft, affiliation and signalling.
most privacy tech and apps are still in the mall ninja cyberpunk mentality, with some slightly self important NGO/public sector affilation signalling with Signal. The aesthetics of privacy need to evolve to drive more meaningful tech imo.
After doing this for 25 years, I have come to the conclusion that one should stick to lightweight tools as much as possible. Complex ones are far more vulnerable to supply chain attacks--be they illegal ones from hackers, or legal ones from business. I have had so many great tools (open source and proprietary) rug-pulled from beneath me. Dev sells out, then the product is either retired or enshittified. What if someone tried to enshittify awk? Good luck with that. There are dozens to choose from. Even with LLMs, they can't enshittify them all.
The future is suckless philosophy.
reminder - there's tech out there capable of reading your mind remotely and non-invasively
For you
- WhatsApp is an exception
For others
- Google is an exception