I want to know how much privacy I’m losing by using proprietary drivers on Debian for gaming. Can anyone help? I would very much like to know that.
Can proprietary drivers fetch my activity on other apps I’m running on my PC, or on the Internet? And so on. Thank you.
Effectively yes.
- All drives have full access to your system. (There are some mechanisms to reduce this but at the end of the day they are running in kernel-mode and with enough creativity can access anything)
- It is very difficult to prove what a closed source driver is doing.
Therefore a paranoid person must conclude that closed source could be compromising their privacy.
However I am unaware of any drivers that purposefully send data to third parties without user consent. (Of course security vulnerabilities exist and you network card driver is sending data to third parties)
Would it be correct to believe if I am using Linux-libre (parabola, for example) that I would have no closed source drivers?
Yes. Any software that can’t be audited, is a privacy breach because we can only trust that the seller is telling the truth “the driver just does the thing it was made for and nothing else.” and most of the time we have seen how this trust has been “betrayed” and the program does other things it should not do.
Even open source drivers can be malicious, it depends on the policy they use. The Linux Kernel itself is also not perfect. Nothing is perfect until someone inspects it.
The driver can access various things, which answers your question with yes. It all stands and falls what intention the developer has and what else in your theoretically scenario plays a role, just reading out app activity alone is not necessarily privacy related when it gets cleaned automatically, could be a feature or the user has no access to such information to use or abuse it. If you are talking about a trojan used in backdoors, then this can be security as well as privacy related concern.
It possible would be of more help if you post the link of the proprietary driver so that the community can review it or and inspect it.
The Linux nVidia drivers are pretty much good to go as there is no telemetry included, and the telemetry in Windows builds is only triggered when there is an actual crash.
The concerns regarding nVidia linux drivers usually coming more because nVidia want to maintain their license which is the reason they load their drivers outside the Linux Kernel. nVidia has documented their Linux drivers more or less well over here.
Of course they are. But that’s the only way some hardware works. I try to avoid them as much as humanly possible. This is why I’ll never ever buy Nvidia hardware.
