Librem 5 handling of Cookies and Other Trackers

Hardware Librem 5
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As it is now with our iPhones and Android phones, we have no way of knowing all of the ways that we are being tracked.

In anticipation of getting my Librem 5, I have some questions about exactly how to maintain privacy on it. I am not only concerned about the initial install of new programs and use of the device, although that is a concern. But I want to know that anything I do to accidentally compromise security can be detected and reversed as I learn more. When I delete the cookies, how do I know that there is not a secret directory that I don’t know about, where the real cookies are hidden? How do I know that some apps aren’t still tracking me? Is Purism going to maintain a manual somewhere, that covers mastering all things related to Security?

One feature that I hope exists in the Librem 5 software, is the ability to pacify publishers desire to force us to accept cookies, and then the browser automatically will delete those cookies as soon as we leave their web page. I think we need not only defenses, but countermeasures to specific standard practices that we know exist from those who spy on us. Out of the gate, I don’t want advertisers to be able to read the IMEI number on my phone, nor to assign me an advertising ID number. If they see me at all, all I want them to see is this unknown person who they can’t identify nor tag for future reference before I disappear from their sight. Is this possible? My fear is that if I don’t plan correctly from day one, that the only way to shake them off later will be to wipe and re-install the OS on the phone, buy a new modem, and get a new SIM card and phone number. Will Purism be willing to build and install apps that hide or spoof the IMEI number? Will Purism be willing to build not only defensive measures, but also some semi-offensive countermeasures for us? The best defense is a good offense. If Google believes that they have identified me as a black or Latino generation x-er female, they will never know that I am a white male baby boomer. I would like to feed them incorrect random information about me to keep the information they have about me, inaccurate. Someone will need to write the code to make that possible. With enough bad data, they won’t be capable of ever really profiling me because there will be too much bad data to ever find and identify the real data. If we’re not careful, they’ll have us all figured out before we can confound them.

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Purism doesn’t make the web browser, and all of your concerns are browser-centric. So, really, you’d have to look into whatever browser it is you wish to use and see what it does about keeping or not keeping cookies. FWIW, Firefox seems to do what I tell it when it comes to cookies. Then again, I block so many ads that it’s hard to say for sure.

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Perhaps this is implied already, but in case it isn’t, the fake profile would have to be changed periodically, wouldn’t it? Otherwise, if the trackers that be think I am an Asian woman in her 60s who uses Brave on a Chromebook (for example), if the profile never changes they still have something to follow and track. Even if that information isn’t true, the information can still be used to identify “me.”

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Why would it matter if they track a you that isn’t you? If you alter your cookies from time to time, they will be advertising random things to you that have nothing to do with your browsing history or your real interests. If they go after anything you value, they will be rejected because of a name mis-match. Any human that sees the profile will say “this isn’t him” or “we have the wrong person here”. But this is only when your other privacy measures have failed. Ideally, they will never even see you.

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Too bad the feature that deletes cookies on exit wasn’t called the “Cookie Monster”, oh the trademark lawsuits would fly!

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If you alter the cookies from time to time, that’s “changing the profile.” My question was more about assuming a sort of alter-ego (a different profile that doesn’t change). It kinda sounded like that was the idea being tossed around.

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Some trackers and ads might also be covered by simply installing a pi-hole on your phone :smiley: or using always vpn and use the pi-hole at your home server.

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Oh yeah, I forgot about pi hole. I have one on a raspberry pi, but that’s the only thing it ever does. Does pi hole every get in the way, say if you’re actively using your raspberry pi while its fielding DNS requests?

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and all this while there are people writing books about why privacy should die …

i won’t give a name but a website that i visited recently wrote something like this (i translated from my language) :

please don’t be concerned about privacy and miss-use of personal-data. according to GDPR policy we have no access to it and everything is automated on the ultra-secure M$ 365 enterprise account that we use …

when i reached this point i stopped reading :sweat_smile:

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Whether or not a company chooses to honor their promise not to abuse your privacy rights or to use your data, why should you have to trust them at all to any extent that is not necessary for each separate transaction?

In real life, do we have a standard practice of handing your whole wallet to strangers, so they can take out however much you need to pay them? No. You stand back a bit, open your own wallet, pull out the appropriate amount of cash, and hand it to them at arms length. With an intermediate party like Visa or Mastercard, some higher level of trust exists because the risk is lower with an automatic paper trail and a third party involved. But the point is that un-necessary trust and bad practices that increase the risk are simply irresponsible and unnesessary. Don’t let them force you in to doing that.

When I go in to a brick and morter business and make a purchase, I can hand them cash and leave with the product. They typically don’t know who I am, nor should they care who I am. The Google and Apple model forces us to give up personal information needlessly. That model needs to change.

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Does the Pi-hole ever encounter countermeasures to it. I once rooted an Android phone and installed a near full proof ad blocking program on it that used root privileges to defeat everything the advertisers tried to do to advertise to me. On some news sites, a message would pop up in front of the story, saying that Ad blocking software was detected. It said and enforced that I would have to turn off the Ad blocker before I would be allowed to read the news story. Most sites just blocked the Ads. But a few sites would force me to unlock the Ad blocker if I wanted to read the story.

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I have been using pi-hole for about 2 years and never had any problem with messages about add blockers.

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I’ve seen it before, but I can’t recall where. The pi hole works by blocking DNS requests to ad servers, so I guess a site could see if its ad loaded or not, and then yell at you for it if it didn’t. Defeating that would be quite a bit more involved, I’d think, but web stuff isn’t my forte.

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That might depend on the capability of your Pi. Run it on a slow, 1 core Pi 0 and you might. Run it on a “top of the line” quad core, Pi 4B and you are less likely to.

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Things are never really easy. No matter what 100% safe, audited, open source software you run and even if you reject all cookies (and take the consequences), web sites will track you through, for example, fingerprinting. So unless you can review the web site, which you can’t, auditing doesn’t fully solve the problem.

So the only really safe alternative is to avoid bad services e.g. avoid free services where the service is paid for via surrendering pieces of information about your life, knowingly or unknowingly.

Which really comes down to potentially missing privacy functionality in the core operating system. The OS needs to provide functionality to deny apps access to the IMEI and/or provide a fake IMEI to the app.

However in some countries it may be illegal to provide a fake IMEI.

The commonsense approach would be from Day 1 to deny all apps access to the IMEI - and wait and see which app bombs or malfunctions. Then decide whether you want to trust the app with that information e.g. what does the app do with the IMEI?

The IMEI is of course not special from a privacy perspective. The same applies to any unique identifier (CPU serial number, device serial number, various MAC addresses, storage device serial numbers, IMSI, phone number, IP address-ish, sufficient personal attributes, …).

But by contrast with, say, a spiPhone, Purism is building a phone that doesn’t contain a gigabyte of monolithic black box code that could be doing basically anything. Never mind a million rapacious apps in the, say, Apple AppStore that could be doing basically anything.

That is a great framework for both defensive and offensive measures. However even if you never do either, at least you have visibility of the manner in which your privacy is being plundered.

Because you may stuff up and suddenly all the yous that aren’t you are then linked to you. :slight_smile:

That depends on the exact nature of the countermeasure. DNS poisoning is a crude but simple and efficient means of blocking. Another approach is a web proxy, used without DNS poisoning, so the blocked content is loaded from the web site (and wastes your bandwidth) but need never be supplied to the web browser. That might need refinement for scripts though because some ad sites might use Javascript to know whether or not the blocked content actually made it to the web browser.

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[Quoted StevenR] Whether or not a company chooses to honor their promise not to abuse your privacy rights or to use your data, why should you have to trust them at all to any extent that is not necessary for each separate transaction?

In real life, do we have a standard practice of handing your whole wallet to strangers, so they can take out however much you need to pay them? No. You stand back a bit, open your own wallet, pull out the appropriate amount of cash, and hand it to them at arms length. With an intermediate party like Visa or Mastercard, some higher level of trust exists because the risk is lower with an automatic paper trail and a third party involved. But the point is that un-necessary trust and bad practices that increase the risk are simply irresponsible and unnesessary. Don’t let them force you in to doing that.

When I go in to a brick and morter business and make a purchase, I can hand them cash and leave with the product. They typically don’t know who I am, nor should they care who I am. The Google and Apple model forces us to give up personal information needlessly. That model needs to change.

Even when I brought shoes at a small business store with cash, shopkeeper asked me for my phone number before he gave me receipt. I looked at him like did he get a clue that I’ve paid with cash. Of course I told him no. Either he gives me the shoes or return my cash. Seemly, more and more businesses are increasingly asking customers for their phone numbers.

My guess is they depend on Google for their businesses, prolly have some kinds of Google software to run their business on Window 10 or Chrome. Even real estate agents too. One of them wanted me to sign up on one of Google sites linked with theirs for reviewing into acquire a handyman they’re connected with to do some home improvements on my house. I had to give that up and find someone else. Good thing I have found contractors to do work on my home. It was hard to find and schedule for because of Trump admin sending hispanics away, cutting their visas, green cards, etc. So I wonder where are the angry white men to do their jobs.

After I got new shed built in my backyard from a small business in my town, they kept sent me emails asking me to take pictures for reviews on their site under Google which requires Google account for customers to share. That shed business runs on Google software. It’s like more people are getting dumber letting themselves being influenced and herded by those privacy-invading corporations.

As for cookies and trackers, I rarely browse the internet on my android phone, even I have Firefox installed. I don’t know how they could send you ads if you don’t do the following,
subscribe, as signing up, giving away your email adresss, phone numbers, home address, and your name. Just avoid any of Google sites. Do they send you ads to your home address?

Only times I got annoying ads into my email is because I ordered something from online stores or gave my email address away to those businesses. Even I unsubscribed some of them, it didn’t help. At least some businesses aren’t as shady. But to browse the internet, be sure to use trustworthy browsers, check your browser and OS settings, don’t give away your info, and be careful what to sign up for. As far I know my personal email isn’t linked to my IMEI number.

So why not get prepaid phone or sim card to use it as separate purposes that can’t be linked to you. This way you don’t answer a phone that always get robocalls. Like having 2 separate email addresses for different purposes. Depending on some jobs, if they require to invade your personal life by having their app install on your phone. So why would you want their job? Indeed you could get another phone to use for personals as long they’re still paying cellular service on the phone with their app installed which you aren’t gonna to use for personals.