How to set up a new Mac mini with Tahoe 26.1 for the best possible privacy.

What settings should I turn off, what do you recommend for the vest privacy on a mac M4 ?

  • Libb@piefed.socialEnglish
    2·
    1 month ago
    • log off all services you can (no iCloud, no Apple Mail,…)
    • use Free Software alternative as much as possible (Thunderbird instead of Mail, LibreOffice instead of Apple Page/MS Word, Firefox or some fork of it instead of Safari or, worse, Google Chrome for which you may consider chromium based-alternatives: Vivaldi and Brave being the first two I can think of).
    • Install a firewall like LittleSnitch to monitor what’s going out of your Mac… believe me, there is a lot. Sorry, I forgot the name of the free alternative to LittleSnitch which is paid for and not open source (but is still a great little app).

    When I was using one of those Mac with soldered on storage (I have been using Apple since the mid 80s, up until a few years ago) I also booted from an external thunderbolt SSD drive. Doing so I was pretty confident I would not be writing anything personal on the soldered-on internal SSD. Doing so, I was sure I would be able to get all my data of the system if I ever needed to sent it back to repair or whatever without hoping that the secure erase was indeed working as expected.

    I recently dusted my ‘old’ M1 Mac and tried Ashai Linux on it. It worked quite well but I will wait for more apps to become compatible to give it a more serious look.

      • Libb@piefed.socialEnglish
        2·
        15 hours ago

        I think that’s the one, yep: an excellent (and free) alternative to LittleSnitch. Thx :)

          • Libb@piefed.socialEnglish
            1·
            14 hours ago

            I could not tell for the last few years (I left Apple around 2019, for GNU/Linux and never looked back) but as far as I can tell, LS was first (hence me using it, back then) and I also think it offers finer controls (and a nicer UI).