Thoughts on Starlink (in regards to privacy)

Posted by Rambler in Privacy

With Starlink becoming available in more areas, and me wanting to ditch my shitty rural ISP where I can barely get 1 or 2Mbps down... what are your thoughts on Starlink in regards to privacy? It's still a beta service and I've not deep dived into their terms to compare to any normal ISP's terms.

Any reason why they should be avoided? Any reason why I should've signed up like, yesterday?

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BlackWinnerYoshi wrote

TL;DR: in regards to privacy, Starlink is... not so great.

Well, let's see what Starlink's situation is, in regards to privacy:

  • Tor support - I didn't actually order Starlink, but it looks like it doesn't block Tor when I just visit the site.
  • Monero acceptance - I guess it doesn't support cryptocurrency, as per Starlink Pre-Order Agreement (clear net only), paragraph two, point three.
  • No personal data required for registration - I don't know where to register (I guess I would need to purchase Starlink to see), but if one of the recovery methods (clear net only) is by phone, that's already suspicious.
  • Compatibility with established standards - this could apply because of built-in VPN support (OpenVPN or possibly WireGuard) and encryption of e-mails you get (PGP). In case of e-mail encryption, there's no mention of it, and in case of VPN, there's also no mention of it, and might possibly be disallowed by SpaceX.
  • No Cloudflare - it looks like there's no Clownflare or some other MITM.
  • As little downtime as possible - not a privacy issue, but the service actually has to be usable. Since SpaceX is so massive, I doubt downtimes are much of a problem.

So I guess just by looking at those six points, it's kind of average. But of course, this alone only tells the minimum, so let's see the privacy policy (clear net only):

  • IP addresses - paragraph one, points six to seven, mention them, but they don't mention for how long the information is stored, only as to why they store them in paragraph two, point three, analytics being the reason.
  • Content data - paragraph two, point one, letter five, might suggest they could watch things like messages, e-mails, search queries, to detect "fraud".
  • System info - paragraph one, point six, mentions that operating system and platform, browser type and version, time zone setting and location, are collected.
  • Metadata - I think that the data collected as per paragraph one, point seven, might apply to metadata.
  • Interaction data - paragraph one, point six, also mentions that the interaction with their services is collected.
  • Third party sharing - paragraph three, mentions that your data will be shared to their "affiliates", government, and organizations involved in business transfers.

Well, that already worsens the situation with Starlink. What about the history of SpaceX? Are they hiding skeletons in their closet? I have no idea, I would have to dig really deeply to find out. And I don't want to do that/

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