Re:Debian Privacy Issues
by alkonaut on Monday February 13, 2023 @11:53AM
(#34776097)
yes, it leaks the information that you use the application (at all), at what times and so on, at a (potentially) individual level.
But I'm not sure what the remedy is for some applications auto updates might be unexpected or even unwanted, but for other applications it would feel pretty bad to not have them and have them enabled by default. That's the user's expectation - not the expectation of privacy for their IP. I think user expectations should be in focus, but it's not always easy to guess. Saying "put the lid on everything and let the user actively enable anything, check for updates etc" also isn't very user friendly.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
I think software updating itself is sort of a windows mentality.
Most other operating systems (linux, macos, ios, etc) update through an os-wide mechanism.
Debian already has apt and that downloads a list of package names and versions from each repo and what is on the system is generally hidden. If the user asks to install a package, then the user has opted-in to download and install that package/dependencies. Also the packages can come from a variety of caches and mirrors.
> I think software updating itself is sort of a windows mentality.
Yes it's definitely a mentality of "the apps are separate from the OS" at least, which is basically every OS except Linux/Unixes with central package managers. Even on a Debian or Ubuntu system, I'd be using dozens of non-packaged applications though (Be they locally compiled from github, or flatpacks or whatever).