Degoogled phones running privacy oriented OS
de-googled.com
de-googled.com
Also I find it ironic that this website is full of Google requests, we've got YouTube, google translate, gstatic content, google recaptcha, googleapis, and google fonts requests all just on the landing page alone.
Doesn't help that it's sending data to Facebook either.
If you think you do not have the expertise to do it, you should ask for help. There is a good chance that you will do something wrong and compeletely brick the phone.
Rob Braxman sells degoogled phones on his online store https://brax.me/prod/host.php?f=_store&h=rob&p=. Some say he is goverment psyop while some think he is pretty legit https://www.reddit.com/r/privacytoolsIO/comments/imf6vx/how_...
Even if you build the image yourself you're still relying on someone else's code. It reminds me of the office space quote, "no one can check all that code. Thumbs up their a$$es."
The best practice is to abandon locked down Android phones and switch to GNU/Linux phones (Librem 5 and Pinephone).
Worse the radios don't support everything my carrier does. 5g is a must where I live as 4g is being skipped in remote locations that are finally being upgraded from 2g.
We're at a point where any successful mobile OS will at least need to support running Android apps, preferably directly from the Play Store. I suspect this is one of the reasons Microsoft is adding Android support to Windows 11.
I like the idea of an entirely FOSS phone, but sadly that ship sailed years ago.
You need separated devices, and do the anonymous stuff in the most private one.
It is the same principle as having separate machines for work and personal stuff.
Yes, it is "impractical". That's unavoidable. Let's keep the conversation on what can be done, not some theoretical perfect device no one will ever make.
Fortunately, for normal computers it's not necessary, because we have Qubes OS for that: https://qubes-os.org
It was mid-spec a half decade ago, and hasn't changed since. You're really paying a lot for that old hardware. This won't help adoption.
The US government one you can't. Sorry. As much as I wish I were wrong, the hardware is probably backdoored, so no custom OS will save you. Even if it weren't a phone by design has to communicate with radio towers (backdoored) and even if you get the most secure phone in the world you still have to communicate and pay for some exotic hardware. Guess who will get added to a list of suspicious people to put an extra eye on?
At the end of the day, all operating systems have exploits. Nation states pay big money online to buy the exploits for their own use, before the good guys find them and out them. If your system is being compromised by a nation state, it is much more likely buy a purchased exploit than by an explicitly-added backdoor.
I can't say anything about intercepting your communications, though. The NSA might or might not have technical ways of decrypting some of your encrypted communications.
Plus, I'm fairly sure the pi is a known quantity. PinePhone less so. Probably the most secure thing you can do is encrypt messages to your friends, send them as a printed out QR code, and make your signature say "burn after reading". Bonus points for a printer that is old enough that it isn't laden with spyware.
This has always stuck with me.
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/538/
Yup. It always amazes me how often people conflate, "The U.S. government can't be bothered to stop people from doing X" with, "The U.S. government can't stop people from doing X". If you want to test this out, try not paying federal taxes for a while.
I know somebody who refuses to use any encryption anywhere because he is worried that he will raise suspicion.
It makes a fine daily driver. Main complaint: Location stamps for google camera photos are a bit intermittent unless I give the sandboxed play services network access. Not sure why it's so hard to ping GPS occasionally in the background, and stick the last known location in the exif data.
Still, I would recommend this setup to the HN crowd.
You weren't the end-user in mind for this feature, it seems.
``` When Talkback is on, it provides spoken feedback so that you can use your device without looking at the screen. Talkback is intended for situations or people who have difficulty seeing the screen. ```
I've also discovered that some apps that require safetynet, can be grabbed from the Huawei store and used, because apparently on chinese phones your bank suddenly doesn't need safetynet to be secure.
i don't even
>installs grapheneos which focuses on security and privacy
>wonders why their location isn't being logged by the camera app
We've been so brainwashed by saas companies to expect that simply collecting information implies sharing it. The point of distributions like this is to remove those cloud dependencies while retaining functionality, and placing that functionality at the control of the user.
I naively assumed, given how GPS works, that I could enable location access, and disable network access for the camera app, and that it would still be capable of copying two floating point numbers from the local GPS chipset to the exif data.
Instead, it wants to call out to some questionable network services.
I'm clearly not the only one that wants this feature. Graphene even includes a reimplementation of the necessary Google API.
However, it (and the original google implementation) are flaky. This all "just worked" on my iPhone and (before that) Windows Phone. It didn't even occur to me that it was a thing that could be screwed up.
very happy with /e/OS for more than two years now.
i live in a degoogled country ;-) so for me the experience is even smoother than local phones which are filled with spy and ad ware.
It is tested using sample-size=1, does not yet have good documentation and I'm in the process (low priority) of setting up meaningful testing and CI. However, I think the code, once cleaned up, is relatively portable to other devices (that support LineageOS). Disclaimer, I'm involved in the development of that repo.
This website is probably just selling you the results of following a guide from a guy who goes by Michael Bazzel. He has a podcast (Privacy, Security, and OSINT show) and releases a privacy book every other year, alternating with an OSINT book. He also has good guides on his website and they sell all sorts of training.
Anyway, if you want it done right, do it yourself and know what you're getting. My understanding is that his guides are aimed at an audience significantly less technically capable than HN.
I prefer to treat smartphones as hostile devices and move important data elsewhere to retain control.
The only downside is I hate Android 12. :P