A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
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.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
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- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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pixel
The app will ask for your camera anyway.
::spoiler Please stop panicking. ID checks are fortunaterly contained on the British isles. They left the EU 5 years ago. . ::
Use work profiles and also try Signal.
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I have a graphene is phone and I have no problems with play integrity api. I currently have two apps (one banking) that does such calls (I see the notifications) and blocked it for both, they still work without problem. By default, graphene does not block it, btw.
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Never had a problem with phone calls. For me, graphene always worked just like a regular android phone but without bloatware.
Android private spaces dont share the same network namespace, meaning a VPN in the main profile wouldn’t effect anything inside the private space.
Use a separate phone for the work stuff.
Yep don’t mix work and personal devices. Im surprised work wouldn’t be providing a work phone.
Or maybe they decided to use a work phone as a personal phone too which shouldn’t be done.
Work phones are unfortunately rare, at least in my field. The number of people who put work apps on their personal phones without a second thought and expect I do the same is astonishing.
I don’t find it surprising, since its not too common a thing for the average person to even consider it could not be ideal. Does lead to some concerning situations though like doing personal projects on a work device that could end up being considered now property of the company.
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It would certainly be preferable to use two devices in this context, but first verify that the apps in question actually use the Play Integrity API, and that you can’t replace them with websites. For myself, I use a Pixel with a custom ROM, and I’ve never had any problems. Of course, it could get worse over time, it depends on the policies of the developers.
Taking your requirements at face value though, iPhone is definitely the correct choice. For the longest time, it was google wants your data but doesn’t care about control, while apple wants control over what you do (to force you to buy their other products) but doesn’t care about your privacy one way or the other. Of course, in the past few years, they’ve both taken some of each other’s worst attributes, but I still think iPhone is marginally better on privacy in stock configuration.
There are definitely ways in which apple is worse: they track your location while your device is powered off, not merely whenever it’s connected to a cell tower or wifi network, and I think they still scan photos uploaded to icloud (but that last point could be out of date, somebody correct me if so). But all that can be worked around if necessary, and in any case it’s not as bad as stock android.
Finally, consider how much has to be tied to your phone at all. Maybe your government apps need to be on the phone, but maybe social media and wikipedia can be primarily used on your laptop, loosening the requirements somewhat. Maybe email can go to your x86 boxes only, even if facebook messenger doesn’t. It depends on your situation.
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I would still recommend using Graphene on a separate Pixel, one that isn’t used as your primary phone. As for Messenger, get whoever is on there to switch to using Signal, which is cross-platform. For a service for mail and backup, I will have to assume that would be Proton, as I happened to use it too (so does my producer, Neigsendoig). iMessage is for sure iOS.
What I would do is get an iPhone only for your work things (since iMessage is an iOS thing), and get a Pixel for everything else and use Graphene on it (with FOSS apps, of course).
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Is buying two used phones not an option? Older models whether it is Pixel or iPhone should continue to function for their intended purpose. Iphones get long updates and Pixel has moved in that direction too. Its not a good idea to use a work device for personal use and not one of the areas to save on.
I’d focus on just trying to get two cheap phones within your budget before even diving into selecting based on privacy to keep work hardware separate.
I’ll go ahead and break this down for you, so you can hopefully see where I’m coming from:
In terms of things requiring the Play Integrity API, it’s a digital lock Google introduced in order to shun any AOSP OS’s like Graphene, and have only DRM’d bullspit in terms of the apps you can install on it. Graphene isn’t easily affected, as many apps right now don’t have the DRM.
In the case of using your work app in a browser, I’d recommend making a profile on a Firefox-based browser (I’m using LibreWolf for my stuff), hardening it to the nines, adding a few good quality extensions on it (uBlock Origin, LibRedirect, and SimpleLogin for now). That way, you’ll be able to, at the very least, ensure you won’t be easily watched with bossware.
For my experience with Proton, I tend to use it on the browser. My producer, Neigsendoig, has had a good experience with Proton, with a couple quirks on iOS that he’s since seen fixed. It’s the best email provider we’ve used, as we had no intentions on using Tutanota, despite Germany’s privacy laws being decent.
For Messenger, I have a sneaking suspicion you’ll just want a device that has just Facebook stuff on it. Otherwise, maybe it’s possible to do a Facebook profile so that way your other ones don’t get touched, and Facebook only sees this particular profile for your Facebook stuff. As long as you firewall it, you should be fine for some cases.
As for custom ROMs, Google won’t be killing them that easily if I’m not mistaken. I think it’ll be rare to find an app with this DRM you speak of, but they are out there. GrapheneOS will be making an OEM soon, and I wouldn’t mind trying that if Pixels are impossible in the future (which they look to be a little harder, but maybe not that much to begin with).
Hopefully, you can see my thought process on this.
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In terms of Facebook Messenger notifications, probably have Google Play Services installed on that particular profile I mentioned… as that could be the safest bet.
For the Google Play Services, I don’t have those installed, and I don’t use apps that require the Google Play notifications in my setup. If an app has notifications, it’s their own push notification services within the apps themselves.
And for when I talked about my producer, this is him on his main channel and his personal channel. I’m his former editor, and the current narrator for a channel that’s currently inactive, being this one since the third video on the channel. I sound very similar to Neigsendoig in some circumstances.