Originally this was a reply to this article about a Windows feature called Recall, but there's a good argument the author's concerns resonate far beyond Windows and Meta to proprietary generally.
this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2025
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Privacy
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And Facebook as an integrated part of the international surveillance state has been firmly established since Snowden leaked the PRISM program.
Like, there are a lot of reasons to switch to linux and plenty of them are compelling. But its an absolute fantasy to believe you're somehow immune to surveillance because you're using the same software as Amazon's EC2. Does anyone really believe the NSA hasn't cracked Linux Mint yet?
Or, for that matter, that using a linux desktop is going to insulate you from being spied on via a public facing 3rd party social media forum?
It's much harder for the government and bad actors to hide backdoors in open source software than making a deal with a private company
For the proprietary software, a lot of it is front-doors. Literally just pay-to-prey. Government agencies pay the big data companies to access their warehouses of scrapped data that come directly off their clients' machines through explicit information harvesting protocols.
That said, it is technically harder to have a covert backdoor in an open source system. But it isn't impossible, or even particularly impractical, so long as the vulnerability remains reasonably obscure. It would be naive to assume your standard array of linux oses are unassailable.
You mean with the USA Intel or AMD CPUs?
Think that it doesn't matter what you use as OS as the microchip inside the CPU chip can read anything it wants
Not my case (ARM) and maybe is time to give some love to RISC-V.
Unsure if qualcom has some backdoor too.
Broadcom. It's a RPi.
Sure. Although that's just a matter of unplugging your computer from the Internet. Also, at least in theory, Linux isn't actively leaking all your data into various Cloud services. Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive are just invitations for the NSA to paw through your file system.
I just can't imagine how Linux protects you from posting on Facebook.
It wont protect there.
Also, I remember articles back then mentioning 5G Towers could create a dystopia because every company could easily put a 5G chip into the product and secretly track you regardless of Wifi.
I'll just make my own cpu with a breadboard and a few wires!
Didnt google actually provide a service to create custom Silicon Chips with to 107nm and open source some Risk-V things?
I think it would be actually possible to create your own CPU through sich thing but unsure if they are able to backdoor it too. I think less likey