There is an interesting discussion going on on TidBITS Talk about whether Apple’s including Gemini AI tools will compromise privacy (Gemini is a Google product). I think it is prudent to be very careful with what one shares with Google. Inevitably, though, it comes down to whether you can trust any code that is proprietary. Apple says they’ll be running the Gemini models locally on your devices, or sometimes in their “private cloud compute” infrastructure. And, actually, they’ve done some interesting things with regard to attestation of the software and hardware that runs their cloud. But, really, it’s difficult to trust any proprietary software because you, or another independent third party, is unable to see the code to audit it. Is it possible, though, to move to an entirely free and open source (FOSS) platform? Here is how I replied to a poster who asked about that.
-=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=-
I don’t want to clutter up the thread with a bunch of non-Apple related stuff [TidBITS is an Apple-focused publication], so this is a private message, but maybe I can help get you started on your journey. One of the most important things @Shamino said is:
This is not a 100% achievable goal
If you’re using an AMD, Intel, or ARM processor there are proprietary firmware blobs on the processor. I seriously doubt that it would be worth your while to switch to, say, RISC-V processors with fully open-source firmware.
What I’m running right now (and I’m not trying to be 100% open source, but I’m a good part of the way there anyway) starts with GrapheneOS on a Pixel phone. GrapheneOS starts with the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and builds a working Android system with all the non-open proprietary Google stuff removed. That gives me a very capable smartphone with no proprietary parts except deep in the processor and boot ROM. For the desktop, I’m running Fedora Linux, which also has a few kilobytes of proprietary code but very little. I’m running on a Framework AMD 13 laptop, which also has proprietary BIOS code and an AMD processor with a proprietary firmware blob. So, not 100% but a tiny, tiny fraction of the proprietary code you would find in the average Windows or macOS laptop.
[He asked if he’d be able to find FOSS applications for…]
email, web browsing, photo taking and handling, RSS reading, .txt note taking, pdf viewing, offline maps
email: There are many email solutions. Easiest is Thunderbird, though Mozilla is threatening to add AI to it. Boo.
web browsing: Firefox is fine now, but again Mozilla is threatening to add unwanted AI features. There are clean forks, such as LibreWolf, that is a fine, standards-adherent browser that is free of proprietary and AI cruft.
photo taking: GrapheneOS comes with a clean camera app. There’s GIMP for photo editing. I don’t know what other kinds of “handling” you might need; I’ve always just used the file system for sorting and filing photos.
RSS reading: Several options. I use Feeder, a free and open-source (FOSS) RSS reader and I love it.
.txt notes: I’m a big fan of Standard Notes, which is FOSS but requires a subscription for a lot of its functionality. Being open source, you could always roll your own non-subscription version from their source code, but it wouldn’t be worth it. You could also use Kate (a desktop text editor), Ghostwriter (desktop markdown editor) and hundreds of other FOSS options. If you like command line environments, Vim and EMACS are unbelievably good text editors.
.pdf viewing: There are several options, but the easiest is to just use Firefox.
offline maps: Ugh. There are several FOSS mapping programs based on OpenStreetMaps. CoMaps is getting pretty good. I used to find myself falling back on Google Maps a lot, but it has become so ad-laden lately that I’m going more and more to CoMaps.
Hope this is helpful. All these things are FOSS, and many have had independent code audits. I’d start by going to the GrapheneOS site and moving on from there.
—2p