pyr0ball

Both my partner and I use "dude" interchangeably for all genders. They're NB for context

Thanks for being a good human, Internet Stranger.

Okami

Sorry to break it to you bruh, but if Facebook owns the IP, there harvesting and monetizing the account data, end of.

This includes all of the subsidiaries like Instagram and WhatsApp as well.

Let's also not forget that illegal activity exposes user data in addition to greed, and just the fact that your data is in yet another pot increases your risk. Also yes all corporations are greedy and evil but they're definitely not all equal in how bad they are, and FB is one of the worst

Are you willing to compromise on all of these intrusions into your life? Many people are, but I'm not one.

Ok so, replacing the head unit might work?

Is there anything a mildly competent electronics enthusiast could do to disable any outbound data?

Certainly! I'm not sure when I'll get around to actually doing it, but my intent was to create an emergency boot drive to send to my elderly family members that they could plug in if the system ever started acting up, and I'll build it in such a way that it'll be able to be booted as a Linux live USB, and also have a Windows partition for any tools that I might need for remote access and in-system diagnostics.

I've built a few scripts for the Linux bootable but I can't seem to remember where I stored that particular repo at the moment, so I'll share later.

Some of my stuff is up on my GitHub (same username)

Thanks a ton for all the advice! 👍🏼

This sounds like a perfectly workable solution!

I assume getting a persistent environment in a USB recovery stick is a bigger task? I'm imagining that, with your method, I would need to repeat this process any time I wanted to update the image or load specific new kernel modules/drivers?

Customizing a base distro sounds like a good place to start 👍🏽

Hijacking for my own idea: what if I wanted to make my own updated version of say, hiren's Linux environment that included tools for data recovery and drive administration among other things. I would love to basically build my own custom recovery environment preloaded with all my favorite tools.

Tbf, with a few hours of googling, I could probably figure this out for myself so don't go through a bunch of trouble unless you want to document for others. I'm mainly posting because I saw OP and wondered if something easy already existed?

The dad jokes are strong with this one