HACKER Q&A
📣 tavro

How do you deal with software tracking your data?


today my colleagues were talking about software collecting usage data and it made me curious.

big companies often profit from this data and often there is no way to opt-out from stats reporting.

how do you reason about this? how do you handle this in your daily life? do you avoid certain software? or do you just accept it? are there apps that respect user data?

:o)


  👤 functionmouse Accepted Answer ✓
Don't do anything secret on the computer

Assume every system on Earth is breached


👤 JohnFen
I avoid software that I know to be problematic. Also, I firewall off all outgoing network traffic by default, and whitelist very sparingly.

For my smartphone, I run a bare minimum of apps and refuse to install new ones without an extremely good reason. I also pipe all smartphone data through a VPN I run at home, specifically so that I can run it through my firewall and make the block-by-default policy I mentioned above cover the phone as well.