Tails: Replacing balenaEtcher with Rufus as installer for Windows

Privacy
1

https://tails.net/news/rufus/index.en.html

We replaced balenaEtcher with Rufus in our installation instructions for Windows to solve privacy concerns with balenaEtcher.

From Tails Gitlab issue regarding balenaEtcher:

balenaEtcher exfiltrates very sensitive information about its users to the Balena company and probably to more third-parties.
For example:

  • The IP of the user
  • The filename of the image, which lets Balena knows that the user is installing Tails
  • The brand and model of the USB stick

They are yet to update the istallation instructions for MacOS, but as of now they recommend:

If you are worried about being identified as a Tails user, you can instead:

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2

Balena etcher have been known to be a spyware and bloated Electron app.

Unfortunately a lot of Linux distros still recommend this shitty software. Please contact them and ask changing it to Rufus and USBimager instead.

Debian

Opensuse

NixOS Manual Claims that you can disable spyware telemetry, but not true.

Linux mint

Ubuntu

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