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Comment by Llamamoe | Hacker News Reader

I have been thinking about this recently in fact. I hate the way Android collects telemetry, but any process and likely most websites I use on Linux can access my clipboard, filesystem, list of programs, OS monitoring tools, even log my keypresses if they want to.

The question is what can I do about this?

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Can't you just lock your browser down to prevent that? Don't allow JavaScript to run in your browser (or at the very least don't allow it by default) and suddenly 99% of the tricks websites use to gather that kind of data about your system stop working.

> and likely most websites I use on Linux can access my clipboard

That is totally false. Any good web browser is asking for permission first.

This is scary news to me. I usually assume Firefox and Chromium on linux do a reasonable job of balancing security and usability. Is the situation really that bad?

It is not that bad.

A browser sandbox escape would be red-alert news and fixed within hours.

Unless there is an exploit that lets a webpage escape the sandbox, they will have access to none of those things listed without permission

An npm install is much more dangerous than the browser, imo. But the fact remains, there is basically no usable security on linux desktops and it is a shame (especially when built on top the exact same core we have very secure systems)

all processes, yes, but no websites

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