[yosito]

I was a bit bored in 2021 and going out a lot less than normal, so I had time to experiment with an Android phone using all open source privacy respecting apps. I managed to make it work, but it took quite a lot of my time and resources and definitely meant sacrificing some conveniences. Eventually, when I started going out and being more socially active again, it got to be too inconvenient for me, and I decided to switch to Apple and be less strict about it. While I did pick up some more careful privacy practices, I have no doubt that my location could easily be tracked by multiple parties. To be honest, it could probably have been tracked much of the time when I was going all out to avoid it too. If nothing else, cellular network operators can determine my position by which towers my SIM card is connecting to, and I have no illusions about that data being private. I'm sure that being tracked by Wifi networks, bluetooth and payment terminals is also happening all the time. I don't like that everyone is so trackable in the modern world. But avoiding it basically means opting out of all of these trackable technologies and living like a monk: no cell phones, no cars, no cashless payments, etc. How many people really want to make those sacrifices?

[vishnugupta]

Thank you for elucidating my two liner. I was writing from a similar experience as yours. Now I believe I've reached a reasonable compromise between inconvenience and privacy. Minimise my data footprint in the private corporation space which means no Google (almost, YouTube and Maps are still hard to replace), Apple ecosystem with all sorts of anti-tracking setting turned on (Privacy relay, hide-my-email, and what not), nextdns, own my email domain + Fastmail.

Which means Apple has just about all the data about me over last ~3 years and so far they seem to be doing a good job of holding fort. Obviously if a state actor wants to screw me then well, all bets are off so I'm not going to guard myself against that as it's way too more inconvenient as you stated.

[sneak]

> Apple ecosystem with all sorts of anti-tracking setting turned on (Privacy relay, hide-my-email, and what not), nextdns, own my email domain + Fastmail.

The best way to increase privacy in the Apple ecosystem is to not use iCloud at all. Most of it (including your photos and backups, which contain endpoint keys and chat history) is effectively unencrypted and Apple can read all of it at any time without your device. Apple intentionally preserves this encryption backdoor in iMessage/Photos/iCloud for the US federal government, who can then access this information without a search warrant or probable cause.

This means creating a burner phone number, using that to create a burner Apple ID that is used only for installing apps, using only free apps (because the moment you put your payment card information in, you're deanonymized) and only using devices bought for cash.

Then Apple has a fair amount of information about you, but it's not linked to your identity.

Apple turns over customer data to the US federal authorities without a warrant over 30,000 times per year per their own transparency report. This is in addition to the normal legal process stuff that involves subpoenas or probable cause-based search warrants.

[yosito]

You're not wrong. And I'm no fan of government surveillance. But my own threat model isn't concerned with protecting myself against state actors. Simply put, I don't have the resources or time to be vigilant about that, so I'm writing it off as a lost cause. My threat model is to protect myself from advertisers and small players.

[novok]

You think that state actors are the only one that also get this data set? lol.