@eff
While I respect the EFF's mission and a lot of the work you've been doing, I have to admit I feel disappointed reading your recommendations in this Opt Out campaign.

The main approach taken seems to be avoiding certain companies instead of evaluating concrete technologies, services and products based on their merit with regard to ensuring users' privacy and freedom. This mainly is an issue in the sections about operating systems and browsers.

I don't understand how the recommendations for traditional desktop Linux operating systems, Firefox-based browsers and especially DuckDuckGo browser got made, if your goal is protecting users.

Privacy can't be properly enforced or guaranteed without good security. Lackluster security means we can't expect privacy controls to be enforced and work as advertised. User choice and freedom also can't be guaranteed if they don't have proper control over their private data, by gating access behind consent that's properly enforced.

In the context of operating systems and browsers this means that you should strive for solutions that are well secured and that have well designed permission models and controls, preferably working at run time, prompting the user for access when requested, so they can make a decision fit to their needs.

Traditional desktop Linux distros, those based on Fedora, Arch, Debian and the like, lack severely in those areas. They almost always lack system wide mandatory access control and obligatory software sandboxing with an accompanying run time fine grained permission model (Flatpak doesn't fit run time and fine grained and has numerous escape possibilities). Furthermore their tech stacks are largely written in memory unsafe code and they also lack modern exploit mitigations found on Windows and MacOS. The best solutions in the area of desktop operating systems are currently Android desktop mode, GooglebookOS, ChromeOS and MacOS, in that order. They are much more secure and have such permission models, although they aren't fully obligatory on MacOS for non-Mac App Store apps. The benefit of MacOS is that it runs on well secured hardware which is rare for desktops, with proper secure elements and ARM chips.

As per the browsers, the best security is offered by Chromium based browsers. They have the most complete and strongest sandboxing, including far going site isolation. Their state partitioning is also good, as well as their exploit mitigations. Chromium also gets frequent updates fixing vulnerabilities, and some chromium browsers also ship those very timely. They also have a lot of permission controls that work at run time and the chromium based browsers that dropped MV2 support for extensions also have a much better permission model for extensions. Firefox lacks severely on all of this. This sadly also has implications for the Tor Browser, which clearly has value if you only look at anti fingerprinting and TOR. DuckDuckGo browser is a WebView browser which has a lot of fundamental security features disabled like site isolation and is therefore really a bad idea.

Interesting resources are:

* https://rknf404.github.io/chromium-hardening-guide
* https://privsec.dev/posts/linux/linux-insecurities/