For my threat model, yes they are trustworthy enough. I am not concerned about concealing my identity from a government investigating me for some alleged crime, but rather just transitioning away from Google and investing my time and money into a company that better respects my privacy. As a result, the centralisation doesn’t concern me as much as it does others and I am fine using Proton for VPN, email, calendar and storage. I also use SimpleLogin, which is now owned by Proton. All their applications are well designed and reliable for basic use in my experience, and it is more affordable for me to bundle these services together. I would definitely recommend them to people like myself, but your threat model sounds a little more complicated so you might want to do some further research and see what else is out there.
an iPhone comes clean out of the box
How does it come “clean out of the box” when you literally just said it requires modifications to the settings to improve its privacy?
at least there’s no vendor garbage
Samsung and Xiaomi apps are vendor-specific and can be disabled, even without the use of UAD (which works fine, not sure why you’re lying about that).
unlike an Android where you’ll be forced into a 3rd party tool or a ROM like GrapheneOS if you want a clean experience.
GrapheneOS is available as an option because Android has an open-source basis. Remind me which alternative privacy OS Apple allows third party developers to create for iPhone? Which iPhone did they allow users to install this imaginary privacy OS on?
You also are sure that your apps won’t be able to get system-wide access
Android applications have been sandboxed for several versions now.
I love the moral grandstanding from virtue signallers like yourself when you get called out on how utterly useless and selfish your behaviour is. I’m still the only one to offer genuine advice here; advice I know to be backed by academics and science. You have literally done nothing other than to encourage this person to continue a form of treatment you know to be dangerous, all to appear empathetic on social media.
The problem with iOS is the lack of freedom and control you have as a user. Yes, Apple may be “better than Google” when it comes to some aspects of default privacy on their devices (being better than the worst is hardly something to brag about), but as a user the level of privacy you can achieve on your iPhone is always limited by the design of the operating system, where you are just a user with no permissions and no ability to modify or even replace the operating system entirely. You are locked into a proprietary ecosystem that you cannot get out of.
I’m not saying that Apple doesn’t track things, because they do, but at least there’s no vendor garbage and you can go through the Settings and disable everything you don’t need, restrict Apps from running in the background etc.
Did you make a mistake here? You are describing an Android device. You can even remove apps entirely from a device with a tool like Universal Android Debloater, and Android allows alternative app stores so you don’t need to rely on a heavily limited selection of proprietary apps.
There is nothing “dismissive” about offering advice to people who clearly need it. In actual fact, you are the one who was dismissive of the issue here by offering some cowardly “feel good” reply instead of opening up and sharing your honest thoughts. Stop tiptoeing around issues and enabling harmful behaviours. Relying on AI chatbots for mental health advice is very dangerous, and it’s absolute madness to encourage this as a primary form of treatment when you are seemingly aware of the dangers yourself.
Totally valid? Getting mental health advice from an AI chatbot is one of the least valid use cases. Speak to a real human @earmuff@lemmy.dbzer0.com, preferably someone close to you or who is professionally trained to assist with your condition. There are billions of English speakers in the world, so don’t pretend we live in a society where there’s “no one to talk to”.
According to that article, he and the owner of the business patched things up and reached a positive resolution. Continuing to be mad about it 10 years later, particularly when no one involved actually cares, is the most terminally online behaviour. Switch off the phone, go outside and breathe some fresh air.
“People” would be, yes. Apple is continuously praised by its rabid fans for engaging in anti-consumer practices disguised as “courage” or “security”. There will always be a very vocal group who believe it is the greatest, most humane and ethical company on the planet. Whether the same people who criticised Microsoft would be criticising Apple is another question.
They all answer to the CEO of Sony in Japan.
Another fundamental misunderstanding of how conglomerates work. There is not one person right at the top telling every single subsidiary to follow their evil master plan to the letter. Each division will be formulating its own strategies to meet whatever targets have been set.
Sony Corporation (which includes Sony Mobile) is not the same subsidiary as Sony Interactive Entertainment (which owns PlayStation). There is no reason to just blindly assume that the two companies have the exact same business structure. You talk about snake oil but the only one making baseless claims here is you.
That has been my experience with Sony phones, too. And as you (and I) pointed out, that device already has official LineageOS support so clearly it can be unlocked. I can only assume this is a regional problem or something. I know Japanese and American variants can have permanently locked bootloaders, which sometimes catches out second-hand purchasers who haven’t done their research.
You can use Universal Android Debloater (updated fork here) to remove some applications, but it’s nothing on the level of a custom ROM. If you are really set on the hardware of the Xperia 1 V then I would recommend taking a look at this guide, written by @TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml. It has some advice for how you can achieve greater privacy on a non-Pixel Android device.
The 1 V is officially supported by LineageOS. Installation instructions can be found here.
EDIT: I will add that support for this device is quite recent, and it is still very expensive even second-hand. You are relying on a volunteer maintainer who makes no commitments about how long they will support the device for, so I think it’s financially risky to buy the device purely based on it having LineageOS support now. You might want to consider the Xperia 1 III, which is two years older and significantly cheaper on the seocnd-hand market, but is otherwise quite similar to the 1 V. It has also received official LineageOS support for a longer period.
Additionally Elon was not even mentioned in this article. I’m sure he knew about it but he didn’t comment publicly.
“Didn’t comment publicly”? Is this a joke comment or are you really this uninformed? The guy was constantly tweeting about it:
And this is only the times I could find him tweeting about it on his personal account. It doesn’t include any of his multiple retweets of other people who were arguing in support of his position (including comparisons to Nazi Germany and Hitler), or any statements he gave directly to the media. It is rather ironic that you went after the previous person for some supposed “hatred” of Musk - maybe we need to be questioning your bias as well, considering you just straight up lied about his involvement in the saga.
Yeah, although I don’t want to assume that person’s intentions or appearance. Speaking more broadly I do agree that there is this sort of counter-movement happening in the online space where people who are insecure about their own body are hitting out more and more at those who have clearly put more time and effort into maintaining conventional beauty standards. Maybe this has been driven by social media absolutely blasting society with images of beautiful people 24/7; the insecure among us assume those who are fit or work out have some kind of ulterior motive or character flaw, like we see with the narcissistic influencer culture, as a way of coping with their mounting insecurity.
Also like, not that it’s necessarily a bad thing that I can see his muscle veins through his shirt, but that’s often a component of that particular corner of Joe Rogan-NFT-Bitcoin-Tesla.
This is such a strange take. Presumably he works out, as do many other people around the world who have absolutely zero connection to “bro-y tech”. I don’t understand why you would let something so irrelevant affect your judgement of a person you clearly know nothing about. It’s almost like some kind of reverse fat-shaming.
Don’t worry, I don’t use it. I don’t like Pixels and I don’t need the security features of GrapheneOS. The level of privacy I require can also be achieved through many alternative projects that support a wider range of devices, including maintaining support for older devices instead of encouraging e-waste, and have communities that are more positive, welcoming and open-minded.
But as I said, if people need that level of security then go right ahead. I am certainly not opposed to its existence; only the attitude from many of its users that GrapheneOS is superior in every aspect and that if you don’t use it you’re somehow uneducated or naive.
I don’t hate the project but I do find its users to be among the most annoying within the privacy community. They seem to have absolutely zero understanding of threat modeling and will get very dismissive and condescending the moment you mention a project other than GrapheneOS.
I think this is likely just a result of GrapheneOS being the most well known privacy ROM; it’s just naturally going to attract the type of person who watches a single YouTube video on a topic and then acts like they are now an expert who deserves to be respected and listened to at all times. Sorry, but if all you can do is parrot dot points from the project’s website and spout some security theatre gobbledygook that has absolutely zero relevance to my personal situation then I’m probably not going to be taking any of your unwarranted advice.
I think some of ypu are missing the broader takeaway from this release of information and the article. It’s not supposed to be some slam dunk hit piece that finally exposes Google as an evil and irresponsible company, but rather a showcase of what can sometimes happen to our data behind the scenes without our knowledge.
Big tech companies like Google want us to think that we can trust them to look after anything we put online, but the reality is that you can never be 100% sure that your data will be kept private and/or secure. Mistakes, bugs and unexpected circumstances can always arise. It is a good reminder to always think about what you’re doing online and whether you really need to be doing it.
I like his videos too and I think this is one of the better ones I’ve seen on this topic. Still, it has been absolutely done to death at this point, to the extent that I find the “don’t trust VPNs” videos to be just as annoying as the VPN ads themselves. I wish everyone would just shut the fuck up about VPNs lol
As always, work out who you are trying to keep away from your data, learn how a VPN works, what it does and doesn’t do and properly investigate the privacy policies of your VPN provider before signing up. Don’t rely solely on these clickbaity privacy and security charlatans - they thrive on paranoia so it is often in their best interests to publish “hot” takes and confuse their viewers. And even if they’re trying to spread awareness in good faith, they still don’t know anything about you or your circumstances and therefore can’t reliably recommended you products.
This is a very comprehensive summary, thanks for the effort you clearly put in.
If I can make one correction, it would be to clarify that Ecosia is not really comparable to DuckDuckGo in terms of privacy. Not only does it log your IP address, but it also logs your search queries and forwards both of these to Microsoft and/or Google (depending on how you choose to search). Ecosia anonymises your IP address after a week, but for Microsoft that process takes 6 months and for Google it takes 9 months. In contrast, DuckDuckGo does not log your IP address and only collects anonymised search results, completely separated from any personal identifier. It does not forward this data to any third party. DuckDuckGo has also made privacy-guaranteeing agreements with Microsoft around ads (which are provided by Microsoft). Ecosia has not made similar agreements with Microsoft and Google from what I can tell.
I notice you quoted the sentence from the description - did you watch the video itself? You are actually repeating a lot Eric’s points and are really in agreement with him. He mentions how privacy is becoming increasingly mainstream to the point that even his “normie” brother started using Brave without his knowledge or input, and he also has a section in there on threat modelling (he calls it the “privacy spectrum”) which he has made an entire video about in the past.
The “pessimistic” introduction is really just a setup for his positive counterargument. He’s not actually pessimistic about digital privacy as you seem to believe.
I have but only for very occasional torrenting. I also used LibreTorrent previously but 2+ years without an update had me a bit worried about a security risk or unexpected bugs. BiglyBT has also gone 8 months without an update but they are still updating the desktop clients so I assume that they’ll get around to the Android one eventually.
You could maybe swap LibreTorrent for BiglyBT as the former seems to have been abandoned.
Stremio does contain some trackers and several years ago the creators even included coin mining functionality, so I personally wouldn’t trust it from a privacy perspective. However I do use it myself and it is a pretty good application.
That was an excellent read. I have often wondered myself how other people are going when I see them so adamant that they’ll never use a mainstream social media/messaging service ever again and now refuse to be friends with anyone who does. I’ve heard “if my friends won’t value my privacy, they’re not real friends”, or variations of it, so many times in privacy communities.
I am mostly concerned with tracking from the private sector; I see privacy as more of an ethical dilemma than an immediate threat, although the corporate surveillance business model is contributing to problems in the real world (data drives social media algorithms which brainwash and radicalise people, leading to increased violence and social chaos). If there is a better alternative to some privacy-invasive big tech app or service then I will make the effort to switch to that. I am willing to sacrifice convenience to support projects that I believe are doing things the right way, or at least putting some effort into being better. However the reality is that most people, whether it’s my friends and family or just acquaintances, do not share my ethical concerns and/or are unwilling to make personal sacrifices and this means I will always need to remain open to compromise to avoid isolating myself socially.
When it comes to the public sector, I am mostly interested in circumventing the federal government’s mandatory data retention laws. which were imposed by a conservative government I didn’t vote for. Again, this is more of an ethical decision; I believe I should have the right to opt out and if the government won’t allow me to do that then the next step is to use tools like VPNs to ensure that data is less personally identifying than it otherwise would be. And again, like data collection from the private sector, my attitude towards government data collection varies depending on whether I see a reason for it to exist. Mandatory data collection of lawful civilians for vague “national security” reasons is overreach and doesn’t have an obvious practical benefit, but during the worst of the COVID years I was okay with the compulsory government tracking of where I had been and when. I saw the pandemic as an immediate challenge we needed to overcome as a society and I was willing to sacrifice my privacy to contribute towards the collective effort.