That last bit is correct. The privacy commissioners are under-resourced and a large number of businesses are not actually compliant with the GDPR. Only a few highly visible infractions get addressed, and even with those the final result is not fixing the infractions and paying the fine; usually a small payment is made along with an agreement that the party will behave better in the future.

While you’re at it, I use Privacy Insights which lets you track what every app on your phone is doing and where it’s talking to.

And I’d like to know why Apple Books keeps accessing my contacts.

That’s because they’re all out of business or bought up by their competitors.

My general rule is: “if they have data they can sell, sooner or later they will.”

There are very few corporations that have proved me wrong.

To me there’s always an ick factor in giving any place that much information about me to do something on my behalf.

What I’d really like is a subscription to the list of 190+ data broker sites so I can run a script myself to check for PII and request removal if found. Bonus if Mozilla provides the script in a format I can review and run.

It’s sad to me that the answer can’t be “the one you run yourself.”

There’s theoretically no reason why everyone couldn’t run their own mail service who had a domain name. But with spam practices being what they are, self-hosted mail will get binned in most places.

I’m drawing a blank on it… makes me think of MK Linux, AKA MicroKernel Linux from the 90s, but I’m pretty sure they’re not related if this is Debian-based.

How can someone not know how to use Debian though? It was a pain when 1.0 was released, but these days installs just as easily as Mint….

Passphrases only work in locales with 5a or similar protection, and either have to be managed by a single person or have the potential to be leaked.

Great for small businesses, but unworkable at the enterprise level.

But having a canary mechanism for smaller businesses is crucial, because they can’t afford to put a wall of lawyers between them and potential government overreach.

I had an odd moment just now of “wait… you mean that isn’t already obvious to everyone?”

Then I realized it probably wasn’t.

One thing you may want to consider is investing in your own WiFi router; you can ask your ISP to set their modem to “bridged mode” and this will turn off their WiFi and firewall and present you with a single gateway IP to connect to. You can then connect this to your own WiFi router.

Why would you want to do this?

Well, currently your ISP is managing the device all your network connects to; it likely is able to have real time updates of all the devices that enter and leave your home, where they are in your home, and what IPs those devices connect out to at any given time.

If you run your own router, you can set up your own VPN, but also your ISP now only knows where your router connects to, and knows nothing about what goes on inside your network.

I figure if you’re going to multihop, ToR isn’t going to be that much slower; might as well go that route instead with the added benefits.

And some for profit. I’m not sure what this has to do with iCloud security and EEE vs EAR though.

I think you and others may be conflating privacy and autonomy?

Unlike Microsoft, Apple appears to use unique regional keys for iCloud, so this risk is significantly less than it could be.

Having said that, that means that the key associated with your iCloud account will be for the region you set when you set up the account— so if you move, I believe your data is still stored in the original region and the key is for the original region.

Here’s one current solution: https://www.howtogeek.com/764236/kde-connect-is-finally-coming-to-iphone/

E2E refers to data in transit: the data will be encrypted between its source and destination. It says nothing about how that data is protected once it has arrived.

E2E iCloud means a third party won’t be able to snoop on the data while you are reading from iCloud or writing to iCloud. But Apple employees can still log into your account and decrypt the data at rest on iCloud in many circumstances because the data at rest is encrypted against a key held by Apple.

A recent example of how this can go wrong was seen with Azure (which hosts some of iCloud) where a Microsoft dev key leaked and attackers were able to use it to generate a working decryption key for the US Government Azure service (a different product) and read terabytes of government data off the cloud services.

The attackers could have targeted iCloud hosting services instead of the US government and done the same thing for all data in all iCloud accounts not specifically encrypted against a personal key held only in your personal keychain.

And if you use iCloud Keychain of course, the same technique can be used to attack your keychain by pretending to be Apple Support and “recover” the contents of the keychain.

If you do, you have to be very careful. SOME data is encrypted at rest in iCloud, not all. It doesn’t matter if it’s encrypted in transit if it’s readable on the servers. Also, while some iCloud services are encrypted remotely against your private key, other services can also be decrypted by an Apple support key.

You can go through each service to ensure it (currently) fits your privacy needs, or you can just go with the basic rule that data managed by others is not private.

Plug in an iPhone to a Mac (or Linux or Windows with third party sync software) and you can set up Wifi syncing. Then as long as the two devices are on the same network, full encrypted backups and file/media syncing will be done.

Step 1: don’t use iCloud services; use WiFi Sync with a computer for syncing and backups. Step 2: turn on Lockdown Mode if this works for you. Step 3: limit the number of apps you install. Step 4: set up VPN to your own network and run a PiHole or similar to filter access.

For most people, this is more than enough guidance.

PrivacyBadger functionality is now built into uBO.

Web of Trust.

It’s a peer-based domain trust system. You can add a web extension to join it. Unlike SSL certificates where all you know is that someone has a specific key identifying their domain, WOT can differentiate between google.com that’s been around forever with lots of people using it, and g00gle.com. So if there’s any domain spoofing going on, WOT will let you know.

Also, if a domain is known for phishing scams or is used as a malware repository, it’ll let you know that too.

To me kagi will always be the DRM supplier and shareware payments processor company.

Well, at least we can count on them to cancel this initiative in short order.

Within a week? I think my ad blocker already handles it; I haven’t noticed ads on YouTube ever, on my own devices, and haven’t seen their latest messaging either.