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Murena is launching a smartphone with a hardware kill switch again (mastodon.social)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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Post reads: "❓ Do you know who are the inventors of the hardware-level kill switch for smartphones?

🤫 Stay tuned! We’re teaming up with them to offer you more privacy.

👇 Share your ideas in the comments! "

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[–] 17 points 1 year ago* (9 children)

auto delete all the telemetry /e/ collects by default, including the Voice data Sent to OpenAI?

You are back with your FUD. I don't know what you have against /e/OS specifically or if you are genuinely paranoid but in this specific instance you are making stuff up! I clarified in https://lemmy.ml/post/35472063 so maybe a language barrier because the post you linked to was in French but the STT service is

  • NOT on by default
  • for paying customers only (0 chance that a random person would activate it and thus be shocked)
  • tries to anonymize the data

So... that's not even telemetry, that's like activating a service which the company explicitly said relied on OpenAI in the first place, people STILL paid for it AND activated it. They can't be surprised that it's sending anything to OpenAI then.

Come on, help us make this community better. We have enough problems with BigTech, small tech and more that we do NOT need to invent problems!

PS: also the reasoning about the presence on kill switch is ... just plain silly. The PinePhones are running Linux, no Android, no /e/OS/ or whoever actor you might dislikes, OSes built by others, e.g. PmOS, Ubuntu, etc and yet still have hardware kill switches.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago* (3 children)

    Not commenting on the other stuff but people should get used to the fact that anonymized private data is still private, so a so-called privacy app should not be leaking or disclosing or selling it. It might be LESS invasive than personally identifiable data, but it's not NON-invasive.

    Who is willing to pay for it after all? Almost certainly, someone who is up to no good. And if you can think of a way it can possibly be misused, then enabling that misuse is invasive.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (2 children)

    I'll preface my answer to clarify that I'm against surveillance capitalism and privacy Zuckering. I say that in the open, do not use Google services, Amazon, have my own PeerTube instance, IoT at home is HomeAssistant with ZigBee, etc. So my goal here is NOT to cut some slack to anyone.

    I started with this because I'm not actually sure what you are referring to. Since my initial comment is about Murena STT I'll assume it's that but if not please correct me. This specific service... is not a compromise I would accept. So I'm in NO way advocating for me. The only thing I'm clarifying is that this service is not something one can "stumble upon" and enable without paying attention. That's why I put such recurring emphasis on it. It's not coherent with "sharing all data" or imagining a scenario where somebody buys an /e/OS phone Murena and somehow ending up getting their data leaked (due to the potentially imperfect anonymization) to OpenAI. One has to activate it and to do so one must be a Murena services paying customer. This is not the case when "just" installing /e/OS. So once again I'm not saying Murena is perfect, not even that it did the right choice (according to my own privacy preferences) my relying on OpenAI, and yet that problem is not relevant to most people who use /e/OS.

    To make a quick a analogy it's like installing WhatsApp on a privacy OS phone. Sure you technically can do that but if you do and complain about how Meta is collecting your data then you did it on yourself, you can't blame the OS developers.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    due to the potentially imperfect anonymization

    I don't understand what you're saying above, but my point is that disclosing any info to adversaries is invasive even if the anonymization is 100% perfect. The potential imperfection makes it worse, but that's a side issue.

    An example is polling. Some terrible politician X wants to know what voters think of issue Y, like "35% in favor". So she hires a polling firm to call people and ask their opinions about Y, with the result being completely anonymized and aggregated, again, like "35% in favor". What will X do with that info? Something bad, of course! We said at the beginning that they are terrible!

    So do you want to cooperate with such a poll, that X commissioned to serve an evil purpose? Of course not! Or at least, I hope of course not. In that case, what do you think of software that effectively enrolls you in such a poll against your wishes?

    If your private activity is being statistically reported to your adversaries, your privacy is being invaded even if there is zero PII in what the adversary gets. This is infosec 101. A quotation due to Silvio Micali is "a good disguise does not reveal the person's height". Statistically summarized information is still information, and calling it otherwise is self-serving nonsense. You want to give the adversary NO information. Anonymization is irrrelevant.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    My point isn't really about the implementation per se (I'm aware of the limitation since at least 2011 by reading then Link Prediction by De-anonymization: How We Won the Kaggle Social Network Challenge so more than a decade ago) but rather that the "solution" Murena offers is not a mandatory service. If people want to use it, they can. I do not want to, I do NOT have to. I'm not arguing that their solution is good, or bad, only that it's optional.

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  • [+] -7 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    You are back with your Spam

    NOT on by default

    This is a Private OS. They should not have this integration, since there are more than enough FOSS alternatives.

    for paying customers only

    Dosent change my point.

    tries to anonymize the data

    Tries. Tries. Tries.

    They claim to be private. They incorporate a non private Service even though there are valid alternatives. Thats where this discussion starts and ends.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Graphene literally ships with the play store and services. That's worse

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    It does not.

    You can install a Sandboxed Version of it, but not more

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago*

    It being sandboxed doesn't prevent it from doing whatever the fuck it wants within the confines of the sandbox, and that sandbox has to be pretty wide to be functional.

    Like, which is worse:

    • An os that ships with an opt-in kinda privacy unfriendly locked behind a paywall.

    • An os that ships google play services, which you need to give all sorts of permissions for apps to function, and requires a google account.

    To quote you:

    They claim to be private. They incorporate a non private Service even though there are valid alternatives. Thats where this discussion starts and ends.

    See how that applies to graphene shipping google play services instead of microG?

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