Comment by amiga386
1 day ago
I don't think Debian intentionally shields you from privacy-invading software. Other distros may differ on this point.
Debian does not mandate anything about privacy in its Policy Manual (which are the standards for selecting and packaging software that maintainers must adhere to): https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/search.html?q=priva...
There's also no insistence on privacy in the Debian Social Contract or DFSG (not that these would be appropriate places for it, they're mainly about licensing)
> I don't think Debian intentionally shields you from privacy-invading software
There is a culture of valuing privacy though, including patching out privacy issues. Especially since a lot of Debian folks are from Europe, with corresponding GDPR knowledge.
I know that the lintian warnings pointing out privacy issues in HTML documentation do get a lot of patches.
Also, opensnitch is packaged as a mitigation.
You are right about the policy problem, Debian really needs to do something about that.
There is at least a privacy policy for Debian services.
https://www.debian.org/legal/privacy
> I don't think Debian intentionally shields you from privacy-invading software.
Don't they change the Firefox defaults for more privacy?
They do indeed, probably other packages have patches too.