this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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"I have more experience with routers than most, but the terms of use and policy documents I read for this article still weren't easy reading. Privacy policies typically aren't written with full transparency in mind.

"All a privacy policy can really do is tell you with some confidence that something bad is not going to happen," said Bennett Cyphers, a staff technologist with the privacy-focused Electronic Frontier Foundation, "but it won't tell you if something bad is going to happen."

"Often, what you'll see is language that says, 'we collect X, Y and Z data, and we might share it with our business partners, and we may share it for any of these seven different reasons', and all of them are very vague," Cyphers continued. "That doesn't necessarily mean that the company is doing the worst thing you could imagine, but it means that they have wiggle cover if they choose to do bad stuff with your data."

He's not wrong: Most of the privacy policies I reviewed for this post included plenty of the "wiggle cover" Cyphers described, with vague language and few actual specifics. Even worse, many of these policies are written to cover the entire company in question, including its services, websites and how it handles data from sales transactions and even job applications.

That means that much of what's written in a manufacturer's privacy policy might not even be relevant to routers."

https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/do-wi-fi-routers-track-you-rbrowsing-i-read-30000-words-of-privacy-policies-to-find-out/

#CyberSecurity #Privacy #Wifi #WifiRouters

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[–] debacle@framapiaf.org 2 points 1 week ago

@remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

Fortunately, my router runs #OpenWRT.
I would love to run #Debian on my router, but it is not powerful enough.

@openwrt@lemdro.id

#dataProtection #privacy