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.

  • @kevincox@lemmy.ml
    13•2 years ago

    Effectively yes.

    1. 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)
    2. 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)

    • @stopit@lemmy.ml
      4•2 years ago

      Would it be correct to believe if I am using Linux-libre (parabola, for example) that I would have no closed source drivers?