Any suggestions or does it make any difference?
Privacy is one aspect of security. Is privacy all you are looking for, or does your question have a wider horizon?
IOW: What are your privacy/security concerns?
At download point
- Your identity revealed to the people behind LibreOffice?
- Your identity revealed to the service you download from (mirror site)?
- Risk of downloading malware/PUP with the LibreOffice installer?
When installing
- Assure that the software does not interfere with other software on your system?
- Avoid any additional software installs (opt-out “offers” and such)?
While using
- Ensure that your document content is not available to unauthorized third party?
- Ensure that “content residue” does not remain (as caches or similar) on the system when you close your work?
- Ensure that your content will remain intact for you (and any authorized entity) in the future?
Or something else that I can’t figure out at the moment?
Tere are many ways to download LO. Here are some techniques:
- For privacy you might want to use Tor Browser to navigate websites.
- once installed using ToR goto the download page for LO - Download LibreOffice | LibreOffice - Free Office Suite - Based on OpenOffice - Compatible with Microsoft
- Once you have downloaded the file via any method, you need to confirm this is the exact file and has not been tampered with.
- This page lists the checksums /hashes (listed below)
- run hashdeep against the file you have downloaded. The SHA-256 is the second (and longest) element in the ouptut… Ensure that hashdeep longest string matches the hash listed for the version you downloaded. If it is not the same then the file may have been tampered with.
- ensure you are using a decent firewall. Simplewall works well and it’s free. You can set temporary rules and it’s really easy to use. It’s not perfect though because like most people will just allow all DNS queries, so resolution of host names are leaked so your ISP will see your machine lookup up say filfthypornvideos.com’s IP addresses but you then use the firewall to interactively allow/block access only to sites you trust.
Filename: LibreOffice_6.4.5_Win_x86.msi
Path: /libreoffice/stable/6.4.5/win/x86/LibreOffice_6.4.5_Win_x86.msi
Size: 278M (291696640 bytes)
Last modified: Fri, 26 Jun 2020 20:29:22 GMT (Unix time: 1593203362)
SHA-256 Hash: 617abddc16b329b9d2dcc38b2df7204856af2aef8f2f308367e320450fd2e126
SHA-1 Hash: 226fef7d0bdf8688827aa79675f3cd84805e76cd
MD5 Hash: 032df51da351de337439fe4667502204
BitTorrent Information Hash: f78f551f3c3577214ce3bf2c3e50442ab2ad3d02
PGP signature available
A general comment - I have only seen LibreOffice make a connection for what appears to be Online update checks - but you can disable Online update as an option upon installation. The other case is when you are copying items from a web page and pasting into LibreOffice. If there are items such as images in the copied content LO will need to connect to the server where the image is hosted to download that content into the document. Apart from that there doesn’t appear to be any privacy or spying issues with LO.