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Comment by nucleartacos | Hacker News Reader

I don't get it. If you're in IT in any role, you know this is happening. I install zero apps on my iPhone. I don't need them. Banking and other secure things are more properly done on a desktop or laptop running some form of nix with proper security in place.
I would never access my bank or other secure website with crucial information via a mobile phone. Call me an anachronism should you wish, but I've never had the tracking worries or data leak worries others do.

On my nix desktops, I block all ads, all tracking cookies, no third-party cookies, I whitelist my bank and Fastmail account for cookies, and I block coin mining, HTML canvassing, HTTP/S referrer, CSS history lookups, and so much more. In addition, I surf through a VPN. Why risk it?

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I'm not sure why you are being downvoted here. I learned a lot from your post! I set up my cookies to stop 3rd party and delete at the end of a session. I also learned about /etc/hosts and blocked a ton of bad stuff at the system level. You are awesome, thank you!

It will never be reasonable, feasible, or worth discussing that e.g. every day users run a linux only locked down desktop and never use their mobile phones. Every time a privacy topic comes up, there is always someone to come in and say "uninstall windows and OSX, delete all of your social media accounts and block the entire Internet, quit your job that requires you to use these devices and services, run your own mail server, if you REALLY care about privacy you'll essentially stop using the Internet, cut yourself off from all of society and make your devices unusable" -- which can offer advice for people looking to do this but adds little to the discussion around tracking, privacy, data security.

If you try to fight against advertisers and privacy-invading trackers and malware alone you will always lose. They are huge companies. They bribe your computer manufacturers to auto-install malware. They infect your operating systems. They have CAs. They have millions to spend on thousands of brilliant engineers who will work around anything you come up with to attack your security and privacy. An answer must be feasible for almost everybody so that we can all enact it collectively, technical or not, or it is no answer at all.

Very true. I mean, I have an iPhone for work. And a dumb cellphone for personal stuff. I do use social media with family and close friends, but that's from notebook and desktop. I don't mix social and work on the same devices, and I'd be out of work if I did.

However, I strive on such insecure channels to be very uninteresting. I restrict everything that's potentially controversial to channels that are more private and anonymous, using VPNs and Tor. I share about that stuff with nobody who knows who I am in meatspace. And vice versa.

So it's not that I'm "cut[ting] [my]self off from all of society". But I am revealing different aspects of myself to society through channels that would take considerable effort to link. That is, I compartmentalize.

I realize that I've gone to extremes. But for me, it's mainly become a hobby. Or rather, LARP. Still, anyone can start compartmentalizing. Just get a used low-end gaming machine, install Linux and VirtualBox, and learn to use VMs. Run a VPN client in the host, and learn enough iptables to lock it down. Run Linux VMs with other VPN clients, to get nested VPN chains. Run Whonix VMs to connect via Tor.

That's rather impressive. Unfortunately, I believe I've made the sacrifice of security for convenience and I may need to reevaluate that sooner than later.

Congratulations. You have the technical acumen to do that — along with, at a guess, 0.0001% of the population of the entire planet.

Not really a solution, seen in that light, is it?

For most users though you actually get better security guarantees if you do that stuff on an iPhone/iPad (or Chromebook I suppose).

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