Yeah, true story. Really weird.

First off, if you’re concerned about phone privacy, consider a custom OS for your phone that respects privacy such as GrapheneOS.

It’s easy to figure out that your device isn’t listening to a constant audio stream 24/7, since that would drain battery and send a lot of noticeable data over the network. However, it is entirely possible to listen for certain keywords as you mentioned, and send them encrypted with another seemingly legitimate packet. There’s no way to be 100% certain, but it is possible in theory without draining too much battery.

The steps you took are good, making sure that apps don’t have any permissions they don’t need. Privacy is a spectrum, so it’s not “all or nothing”. As I mentioned before, if you’re seriously concerned about mobile privacy and want a solution, you can get a custom operating system that can remove any privacy invasive elements. GrapheneOS also allows you to disable the camera and microphone system-wide (although this functionality is present on some other Android builds).

If it eases you any, a lot of these advertisements happen to be coincidence and trigger confirmation bias. It could be that those ads happened to show up by coincidence, or that advertisers managed predicted your interests, or that you got tracked by some other means while downloading the movie. The possibilities are nearly endless.

Hi! Back in high school, me and a few close friends formed a small hacking group aimed at hacking the school WiFi. We succeeded, and reported the vulnerabilities we found along the way to the school. Our school had a policy where students who managed to hack something would be let off the hook if they reported exactly how they did it. I managed to land a job for the school district as a result of our fiasco. I don’t recommend anyone do that, but I managed to get lucky.

Anyways, once we had access to the WiFi we wanted to get around the network wide filter. Proton VPN worked for a while, but quickly got blocked. Dual booting into Tails on school computers didn’t work until the 6.0 update. To my knowledge, it still works.

However, for our phones, the thing that worked was changing the DNS. We found out the network wide filter the school boasted so highly about was only a DNS filter that resolved hostnames to a “blocked” page. Find a good PRNS and change your device’s DNS to match. If you want a search engine, try to find an unblocked SearXNG instance.

Good luck!

P.S. Don’t forget: Tor is portable on Windows devices :)

I may mirror it to Codeberg in the future. The honest answer is that I was in a panic and needed somewhere to quickly get the project back up in case GitHub never resolved itself. GitLab was a good choice since it’s open source and has a lot of other big open source projects on there.

I have wondered why they haven’t taken the opportunity to come out with a Graphene-lite for non-Pixels

The issue I see is simply a lack of developers to do so. Trying to split the team between two mostly different projects would most likely cripple both.

Rust is ranked #26 with a score of 351. The only program that used it at all was Mullvad VPN. It was used as the majority language for that program, amounting to 35.1% of the entire program.

Plenty, as well as the upcoming release of Toy Story 5.

I bike at night often. Very few turn off their blinders for me. It’s so bad that I have to come to a full stop until the car passes. If you have ever turned off your blinders for bikers at night: Thank you, seriously. We appreciate it more than you know.

(Last I checked) From this spreadsheet, Discord is the fourth worst messaging platform in terms of privacy. Now a new row for “Has ads” will have to be added…

I once asked a friend if he trusted the lock on his phone (brand new iPhone 15 Pro Max, latest and greatest). He told me he did. I asked him if I could use his phone while it was locked, and he told me “No, I don’t trust you. You would probably hack it or something.” That statement says two things:

1. He only cares about attacks on privacy on a personal level, which is the mental flaw lots of people have.

2. He doesn’t actually trust the lock on his phone, but refuses to admit it.

By the way, here’s a few fun gimmicks you can pull on iPhone users:

1. See if you can swipe left to view widgets on the lock screen. I was able to get someone’s address this way. He told me the whole time “There’s nothing you can find there.” and then afterwards said “Ah, crap.”

2. If there is a lock screen mini widget (under the time) for a clock or related feature, tap on it and it will open the clock app. You can also get there if you can swipe down to access control center if the “timer” button is enabled there. You can then make it look like you unlocked their phone, and start reading off their alarm names. This one has freaked out a lot of people.

3. If they realize how you got there and try disabling control center access on the lock screen (as they should, FaceID is fast enough people!), you can see if you can access Siri and say “View my alarms”.