Lots of good advice here, but many might be too extreme. I find such all-or-nothing approach intimidating for people who just started to think about improving their privacy situation.
Let’s see… you are angry about bloatware. It can come from two sources - mobile service carrier and phone manufacturer. How to get rid of it?
Buy only “unlocked” phones. Then the carrier will not be able to push anything to your phone. You will also be free to change the carrier as you wish.
Buy phones from manufacturers that don’t install too much bloatware. Google Pixel has only Google apps, Motorola also is almost vanilla Google. Fairphone is more exotic, but an interesting option. iPhone is OK too if you want Apple ecosystem, but customization is not a thing there.
Now, we are in a privacy focused community and I saw your later comments about Google being an opposite of privacy. I would argue that vanilla Pixel is much better than bloated and locked Samsung already. I see you get recommendations to replace the OS that your new phone might run, and these are valid, but come with significant downsides. There are other ways to improve your privacy stance by changing the way how you use your phone without changing what phone or what OS you run on it.
Warning about bringing an unlocked phone to Verizon (even if it’s a current flagship Apple/Samsung/Google device): 50/50 they’ll lock you out of WiFi calling/HD voice, etc. Because they’re dicks.
In the end, choosing which project to use can be difficult just because of politics between the communities of these projects, saying a certain project is unsecure can get people using that project defensive, so keep that in mind
i like bluesky mostly because it’s the most like early twitter.
lists are also amazing.
iirc, i believe they said the reason they went with atproto instead of activitypub was because activitypub didn’t do full account backup so you can take everything from one server to another.
For best privacy AND security, Pixel 8 or 8 Pro with GrapheneOS. Nothing else compares. The Pixel 8 series are also the first that support hardware memory tagging, basically making them immune against 70% of all exploits.
Privacy is a collective “war”, it’s not something that can be fought on individual level. You can adopt some precaution on a personal level, and try to do better, but it’s something that must be brought to a collective level.
It’s a collective war that I also feel is lost. Especially, when there is little to no policies in effect to stop these data brokers. Unless you live in California.
Even then, not so much. I’ve been tugging on those particular wires, and the overall response seems to be, send a reply once, then ghost you until you’ve forgotten that you asked them. They do nothing during that time, and will probably continue to do nothing well after we forget.
We have policies on Europe but even they do not help. The ad business is completely out of control, on some sites there are over 200 as companies gathering your data and selling them through the real time bidding system. it’s impossible to know who bought the data. just have a look what’s been uncovered lately.
very few, and one has to try so many times… I gave up. I guess RSS feeds whenever possible. though that consumes disk if local, so I’m really reluctant…
It just keeps reloading and after 5 tries it gives up. I could probably go through each domain manually but I’d like it if they could let me keep the 3rd party domains disabled.
Just wanted to share my experience as someone that just updated to a p8p with GrapheneOS.
This is the first time I install a custom ROM in a smartphone and it hasn’t been easy but I’m pretty impressed so far. I installed their sandbox Google Play/Services to keep using banking apps and other apps that need it. Everytime I install an app it asks if it should have internet access permission so I can use Gboard without the need to use NetGuard.
I can limit storage scopes for every app. If I want WhatsApp to only be able to access my Downloads folder, I can. If I want to trick it saying that it has access to my contacts, I also can.
The biggest issue for me now is probably install/use things in a way that just don’t throw all the OS purpose out of the window and without asking questions considering how awful people can be when they think a question is dumb.
I was a bit disappointed with the lack of microSD but I realized I probably wouldn’t use it. I also had to install a custom launcher to customize icons and such.
One thing that worries me is how to setup a way to find my phone in case I lose it.
I’m aware of FTP. It’s still around in certain circles. But for a moment I thought that there was some sort of integration between ftp and git. I guess not.
i think that is only valid for text, the method to restore blurred text is to draw and blur a lot of combinations and compare them to the blurred image. that’s probably not a thing with faces i guess…
That does sound more effective. You really have to trust that the blur algorithm cannot be reverse engineered if you use that. Removing the data seems more certain than transforming it somehow.
I recall a story of a pedophile being caught because they posted pictures using a radial warp on the face. It wasn’t too hard for enforcement to code a filter that undoes the radial warp, and instantly saw the original photo to identify and lock away the creep.
To my knowledge, it’s kind of hard to quantify exactly how much information is lost with a normal blurring algorithm (gaussian, box, etc), but it’s usually less than you think. There are certain edge cases where no information is lost at all and the original image can be perfectly reconstructed if it’s simple enough. Even if it’s a normal photo of something complex, a deconvolution algorithm can work seemingly impossible magic on a blurry image without the need for an AI that will hallucinate details.
On the other hand, pixelating part of an image provably removes a large amount of information from that section of the image and no algorithm will be able to de-pixelate something without hallucinating details. Using a big box is the absolute best because it just deletes all information from that part of the image.
ETA: the problem is a lot worse in videos because you can use multiple frames with different offsets to reconstruct a higher quality image even if it’s pixelated.
They had to ask adobe if i recall correctly. Which does mean it isnt as easy as it sounds to reverse engineer (since adobe developed it, they obviously knew how to do it)
I use Authy and am logged in on multiple devices so if I lose my phone I can still access the 2FA on my laptop. Then log back into the new phone using the laptop.
privacy
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.