Monday, January 29, 2018

Mac and iOS Privacy Guide

Andrea Callea (via Hacker News):

In this Apple-user-oriented and safari-and-mail-centric guide to improve privacy, security, and speed for the Average Joe online experience, I suggest some extensions, applications, and components for both macOS an iOS.

[…]

To both make a point of how simple it can be to mitigate risks, and to encourage you to continue reading this post, I’ll start with the one regarding Mail and requiring the least effort: email tracking. It is a sneaky and deceitful practice that went from sacrilegious to an unnoticed, widespread, and abused practice, easily accessible to everyone. It’s also very hard to effectively defeat. The only effective method to mitigate it today, according to the conclusion of Englehart in this article, is to disable remote content from automatically loading in your emails. The only downside is that you get uglier emails but they would be safer. It’s a good compromise and you still retain the choice to view the email in your web browser, should you want to. So, go to Mail preferences and disable remote content, on both macOS and iOS.

Update (2018-01-30): See also: Bruce Schneier.

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