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?

  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.