in that case, you’d be better by not using Google Messages. According to the discussion I linked there seem to be a few other proprietary RCS clients in the Play Store, other than Google’s and Samsung. Not sure of this myself, but it’s worth looking into it.
If you don’t want to install Google Play services, your best bet is trying your luck with any RCS client other than Google’s. Even Samsung’s (if it even works outside of Samsung phones) has a bigger chance of working without Google Services installed.
Once you find one that works on a degoogled Android, just follow the usual recommendations: install it in a separated profile, give it as little permissions as possible, maybe a VPN if you don’t want them to get your IP (although given that your RCS provider will probably be your ISP this might prove pointless), etc.
And remember to assume that it is not private at all and they are harvesting all your metadata. The encryption is proprietary too, so there’s that.
Edit: I just remembered that encryption is probably exclusive to Google Messages. So you’re screwed, I highly doubt Google Messages will work without Google Services.
I’m guessing that in the near future when Apple launches RCS, we will have more options in Android too. So just keep up with the RCS news.
if you’re a developer, there’s a very easy and practical way of testing this without trusting anyone’s (not even Google’s) word:
compile the most basic of flutter apps or some demo and see if the app makes any kind of request to the internet.
edit: a single web search reveals that Flutter has indeed Google telemetry enabled by default. developing your web searching skills is a good habit for developers.
I have a Windows 10 partition on a second machine. I have disabled automatic updates in the options and I never click “Update at restart” or anything. Yet, whenever I need to boot into Windows it decides to automatically start updating itself.
I guess that I use it infrequently so there are always updates available, but it shouldn’t force them on me when I’ve specifically disabled them.
FreeBSD’s Wayland support is through a Linux compatibility library. The major Wayland implementations are Linux only and there’s no way around it other than implementing Linux libraries like FreeBSD did.
just curious, I get that anti trans posts suck and should be removed, but what’s wrong with anti Wayland posts? it’s just tech talk, not harming anyone.
They admit to be sending your IP to Bing with every search too.
“For example, when you do a search on Ecosia we forward the following information to our partner, Bing: IP address, user agent string, search term, and some settings like your country and language setting”
apparently in some cases uTorrent, BitSpirit, and libTorrent simply write your IP address directly into the information they send to the tracker and/or to other peers
These are just bad practices by shady bittorrent programs. Choose a good client and you’ll avoid those issues.
The reason why is that Tor doesn’t support UDP and it’s just harmful for the network to do bittorrent over it.