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How to setup new Mac Mini M4 for best privacy (infosec.pub)

submitted 1 month ago by rook@lemmy.zip to c/macos@lemmy.world

7 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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 ?

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[–] SanctimoniousApe@lemmings.world 4 points 1 month ago

Why would that be Mini-specific?

[–] Libb@piefed.social 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] sveltecider@lemmy.ca 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Little snitch vs lulu firewall?

[–] Libb@piefed.social 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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

[–] sveltecider@lemmy.ca 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I've always used lulu. any advantage to little snitch?

[–] Libb@piefed.social 1 points 3 weeks 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).

[–] jet@hackertalks.com 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Don't link or setup an icloud account.

Have a admin account, never use it

Run everything from a unprivileged account

Use virtual machines such as UTM to segment your different workloads.

Only allow the admin user to decrypt the hard drive. I.e. on first boot you login as admin then logout then login as your daily driver

Never, never, install anything that needs admin privileges