(Please when answering, assume I’m not a beginner at privacy/programming :) I know where the good stuff at)
First off, shameful confession: I’m writing this on a dying yellow iPhone XR I bought second-hand three years ago (189€). I absolutely love the look of it: the screen, build quality, are all amazing. The only problem was the locked ecosystem (sideloading Spotify/Torrent client was sooo hard).
I saw the android phone of my mother dying really fast. She currently has a Xiaomi phone that’s ridiculously big for my hands, there’s advertisements in the stocks apps (?!!), the UX is janky and everything. It looks like a bloat, privacy nightmare.
So… because it’s impossible to find a jailbreakable phone nowadays I need to buy an android and ideally I would want:
The things that scare me off:
The things that excite me:
But to get all of that, I don’t want Google, I need shitty apps (non-free software) I have to install:
Any advices? Phone ideas? I’m so lost in this ocean of choice (freedom ✨)
My current phone:
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
I would just add a +1 for Sony Xperia phones with LineageOS support (do check). They offer OLED panels, a 3.5mm headphone jack, & microSD card—with the last two once being standard now almost impossible to find despite their usefulness.
As for services, many of them can be accessed thru a browser. There are enough Firefox forks out there that you could stay authenticated with these grimy, untrustworthy apps & another fork with your typical web browsing.
That said some of this could be given up to an extent. If you have a microSD slot or carry a separate DAP, there shouldn’t be much need for Spotify where an offline library is quicker, saves data, & can offer higher bitrates (obv no ads too). Microsoft GitHub is not useful on a phone since no one codes on a phone & you can subscribe to the things you need either their Atom feeds or via email & all of your personal code should be living somewhere off the proprietary platform—especially if you want to help access to contributions since it is blocked for US sactions in some regions & they bow out to capitalist interests (see youtube-dl, or Switch emulators, etc.), while requiring your contributors give up their privacy as there is no way to report bugs or send patches without an account. And the chat options, depending on the situation you should see if you can get folks to consider your privacy too (else why on this sub?) & switch to something decentralized & with E2EE the default for DMs & optional for groups—XMPP is a great default choice, Mumble was built for games, but there are other options. Need is a strong word, & it might take a few years, but eventually, hopefully you can ween yourself & help friends get off these platforms as it is bad for them too, but you are not going to get much privacy if the corporations & governments can still read all your chats.