About MacOS Hardening and Privacy

[greyerskies]

I appreciate you sharing indepth knowlage about MacOS security. I believe that privacy can only be achived, first, with security. However, I also believe that transparency is key for privacy, so I absolutely support open source software and I do prefer it over closed souce stuff. I wanted to ask about the implications of using apple's software, since apple is known to not respect your privacy as much as they say and you can not be sure what apple programms do (because of them being closed source). For example, when using safari.

I know that if my concern is that closed source software is not transparent enough I shouldn't be using it in the first place (QubesOS would be a better option, or any other Linux distro), but I need apple hardware for work and I want to learn how to use it properly in order to benifit my needs and my rights.

[beerisgood]

Thanks for your feedback!

Apple is not as transparent with everything as they should be, that's true. But I can't confirm that they violate data protection.

For me, the not complete disclosure of all details is the smaller evil in contrast to poor data protection and/or data protection as with other companies. At the end of the day, it depends on how much you trust the company/product/service, ...

Open source I do not put over closed source for several reasons:

• poor maintenance
• Security is lower because fewer people check/program the code
• Development usually ends quickly because it maintains only one community or a single programmer
• cumbersome and insecure installation necessary

Linux is another big problem in many areas. in my other repository you will find a lot worth reading: https://github.com/beerisgood/Security-link-collection

[greyerskies]

As a matter of a fact, I kept reading some things of your other repositories and I did end up exactly there. Thank you for disclosing reliable information. I feel as time goes is harder to find a solid source of knowlage adressing security and privacy concerns, there is too much disinformation spreading through the web.

As I kept reading your reply, some questions emerged:

• How can you be sure that your data is being kept safe and well protected if you can not check what methods are being used to do so or if they are being used at all?
• Open Source projects usually have the issues you mentioned before because of the small economic support behind them. They are usually community driven projects, voluntiers without any substantial revenue or revenue at all work off hours to make them. Since Apple (in this case) does have quite a bit of money, what is keeping them from releasing their code and maintaining the necessary repositories? Hell, I think they could benifit form it, like google does with chromium and AOSP.
• Is there any other way to be transparent about it that does not necessarily involve mantaining open source repositories?

Thanks again.