With GrapheneOS installed, I am motivated to lock down the Mac a bit further. I dusted off my privacy geek hat and put it on last night, and did two things:

  1. Installed little snitch
  2. updated and tried to fix1 my Linux VM on Windows

There are technical challenges, but I find that the biggest hurdle is convenience. For example, I could disable Spotlight on the terminal level and block it from communicating with Apple servers (I see this is possible, at least to a point), but do I really want to stop using Spotlight?

The same issue exists with LibreWolf, my go-to privacy browser. Every session I start is a clean slate, but do I really want to deal with typing my credentials and having my settings reset for frequent websites each time?

If my Mac is my main productivity machine, perhaps I can utilize a Linux VM for privacy. It’s geared better toward privacy anyway. But what do I use where? What should be private, and what doesn’t need to be?

A screenshot shows a list of network-related processes and domains categorized under Core Sync and macOS, with various checkboxes indicating allowed or blocked access to sites such as adobe.com, apple.com, and icloud.com.
  1. My Linux VM has and audio/video issue. The refresh rate rate of the screen can be really bad, with parts of a staying frozen on the screen long after I drag it away. And for now, there’s no audio at all, even though I reinstalled my audio drivers on the host.