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·
    2 days 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.

  • jetAEnglish
    1·
    2 days 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