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Tails no longer recommending balenaEtcher (tails.net)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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I am shocked by this - the quote in below is very concerning:

"However, in 2024, the situation changed: balenaEtcher started sharing the file name of the image and the model of the USB stick with the Balena company and possibly with third parties."

Can't see myself using this software anymore...

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[–] 58 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

That's interesting, apparently it was mentioned on github but nothing seems to have changed in the end

https://github.com/balena-io/etcher/issues/3784

Haven't used that software in a long time but maybe there's an opt-out somewhere during runtime? Although I don't see why a user needs to be required to opt out of nonsense like this when just writing firmware to a USB disk.

Only ever touched balenaEtcher when some project or distro recommended it. Overall prefer Rufus for this sort of thing when working on Windows.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    I've used Sardu on Windows for making multi-iso bootable USB sticks a long time ago in the past, but I'd admittedly never looked at their ToS or Privacy Policy. My use case was slapping some live boot antivirus scanners, data recovery tools, and one or two lightweight liveboot-Linux ISOs on one USB as a portable toolkit.

    When I'm making anything else from Windows, I've always stuck with Rufus. Had never heard of BalenaEtcher before now.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    I"m horrible with names of programs and mess with a lot of junk comps switching out OS's and just tinkering around so I'm always using crazy utility programs. BalenaEtcher is used in a lot of tutorials or guides for installations, I think recently both Elementary OS and even Ubuntu had instructions pointing towards BalenaEtcher.

    I never thought it was a great program, it was finicky to use and errors out quickly multiple times. Looking back I saw the signs, weird new program being promoted above other "well established" burn programs, ads, and now scrolling down their webpage it's just a bunch of promotional subscription bullshit. I think I just threw up in my mouth a little bit looking at the "balenacloud" and "balenasense", like if they're collecting your data through etcher then all of that shit is probably compromised. Another fucking google wannabe corp.

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