I hear many people say that the Google Pixel is good for privacy, but is it?
I’m asking this because I find it weird, of all the companies, Google having the most “privacy”.
You can install on it a lot of custom ROMs, including GrapheneOS and CalyxOS.
additionally you don’t need to jump across several hops to flash custom roms on Pixel phones (or tablets)
it’s easy as using a web browser
meanwhile custom roms on Xiaomi or Samsung are a huge pita to setup and require almost shady looking korean or chinese (windows) applications
Installed GrapheneOS and adjusted my google settings to track everything they can, then I checked to see how much data that got collected, it is almost nothing.
This is gonna be a foolish and stupid question but how did you check how much data was being collected?
Under GDPR you have the right to download the data they have about you, so google has a page where you can do that. That being said I doubt that is everything they track, I’m probably still getting fingerprinted and tracked by ip, but still thats a lot less info collected on me and most importantly that data is less valuable to sell.
Commenting from my GrapheneOS Pix6, I actively prefer GOS to stock, and get a sense of disdain or my soul sighing every time I pick up my stock rom Pix6 now.
I bought my girlfriend a Pixel 6A as birthday gift last year and whenever I use it I’m blown away by how smooth and fun everything feels on GOS. Every other Android I use feels so sluggish, blown up and hard to use in comparison
I was explaining today to a close friend that I (anecdotally) have noticed a significant reduction in battery usage on my GOS pix 6.
The whole device feels snappier, more responsive, and I can certainly attest that I got 9+hrs out of this thing at max brightness playing terraria. Can’t say the same for stock rom in the same conditions, while I don’t have the technical knowledge to prove it (and I’m happy to be proven wrong) I’m convinced the majority of my stock rom Pix’s battery is eaten by proprietary software phoning home.
With that said, unless I go out of my way to disable certain privacy aspects of this phone or implement spmit-tunneling on the VPN it’s set to go through, unfortunately many sites/apps break. For these instances I generally use the stock pix. (Eg. Gov services/KDE Connect).
Hey, which app do you house to get emails? I don’t think there is a thunderbird port for Android, is there?
Will I be able to use such an app with Google emails without play services being installed on the device?
K-9 Mail for Android has merged with Mozilla and will eventually be renamed to Thunderbird. Its UI has seen a lot of improvement these past couple of years, and the backend has always been reliable for IMAP (including push notifications).
Sorry for the delayed response here, however I primarily use a proton address, and I currently have a redirect in place for my Gmail to the proton. My intention is to close the Gmail all together, however that’s not yet possible as I will likely miss important emails in the process, I am (as discovering) updating my email addresses for each service as it becomes known so as to avoid such occurrences.
As it stands, I have GPS on another user profile to add to the security provided by GOS sandboxing, not that I don’t trust GOS devs, I don’t trust GPS not to sneak in somehow.
I hope this answers your query, do dm me if need be for further explanation.
Edit: I cannot speak further as to email clients, as I have yet to perform further experimentation. I do intend to get to it soon, though if you beat me to it, do message me to let me know how you went and what you’d do differently.
Edit pt2.: I have checked, both my pix6’s were from a close batch and manufactured the same month, I suspect due to this battery degradation is not applicable.
I get a lot of use out of Google wallet. Can that be sandboxed on graphene?
Yeah. I thought it was weird, but the stock Pixel is very secure, and if you install Graphene OS, it is even more so. Additionally, Graphene OS sandboxes The Playstore Apps, and gives you much more control over what the Apps you install are allowed access to. You have to go way out of your way to make it less private than the stock OS, and you pretty much can’t make it less secure than the stock OS.
You can get almost anything that works on the stock Pixel working on Graphene OS except for Google Wallet and the Android drive app. Banking Apps work, Google Apps work (but you might as well try to use alternatives).
I had an iphone for years, but after using Graphene OS for the past 3 months, I can honestly say I’ll do everything I can to not go back.
GrapheneOS on a Pixel 7 is one of the best decisions I ever made. You can sandbox the shit out of all apps and granularly control the permissions in addition to outright cutting off network access to apps that would otherwise be doing background telemetry garbage all the time.
If you’re terminally online and just can’t imagine life without all the first party Google apps, you’ll disagree with me. But otherwise it is a great decision. F-droid and Aurora Store are awesome. (You can still manually install and use stuff like the Google camera app, Maps and others. Just never sign in to first party G Apps, be careful with your permissions etc. and you’ll retain 90% of the functionality while not having the privacy downsides.)
I’ve been using LineageOS+MicroG with very little google software (only maps) and it’s been working great. Any reason I should switch to Graphene? I noticed the main dev seemed to have some disputes and interesting personality characteristics, so I was a bit hesitant to adopt. I also had an irrational “I wouldn’t be surprised if 3 letter agencies are involved” vibe about Graphene, but nothing concrete.
That’s quite a statement, are you sure about that? The Graphene team has done a considerable amount of work sandboxing the environment of Google Play, both in memory, permission structure, and IO access that MicroG completely blows past. Given how the Graphene sandboxing works, I actually can’t think of a scenario where the statement that MicroG is more private than Graphene sandboxed Google Play. In either scenario you don’t have to log in, so I’d much rather have an environment that has been isolated than tooling that still has tendrils reaching into the main OS itself (MicroG).
Yes, it is. I mean, GrapheneOS is the gold standard for privacy&security, but even stock Pixel is a good step up. Think of it like this: on stock Pixel, only Google is tracking you, not Google + Samsung, or Google + Xiaomi. Just Google. It’s guaranteed to be a step up from all other Android phones, stock or not.
Wait since when a monopoly is preferable to a duopoly? As far as I’m concerned if I can’t have 0 companies to spy on me I’d rather have them all fight each others in the data space…
In this case they don’t fight, they exploit your data in different ways and if one of the exploiters isn’t arsed to keep your data secure then everyone gets it and it’s not just corporate actors profiting from you but more harmful actors including scammers using your data.
