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How Google Tracks and Scans Everything on Your Android Device
(www.howtogeek.com)
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this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2025
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DeGoogle Yourself
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Not mine... Graphene, baby.
The irony of having to buy a Google phone to get rid of Google services will never cease to amaze me. :/
Graphene is working with a different OEM, so, we may not need Google's devices to run GrapheneOS soon.
You can buy second hand phones and then Google doesn't get any more money. Easy solution.
Unfortunately, Google manufacture the best-in-class hardware device when it comes to security features.
The real irony is paying Google what you'd pay for an iPhone 16 and getting iPhone 11 performance and they're spying on you and selling your personal information to who knows who. Okay but you wiped the phone and installed custom firmware that doesn't track you... but you still paid Google the price of current-gen iPhone and got a phone with the performance of one from 5 years ago. Google still won.
The personal information is the point, that's the real gold mine, and they'll get it from enough people to not care about the less than 1% of Pixel owners flashing Graphene. For those users, they're happy to sell generations-old tech at a premium. And they call you a sucker behind your back. And then tell you Apple is the big corporate overlord you're running from and make it sound like Apple is the enemy. (I'm not saying they're not, but that's a convenient story among fandroids. And it may not even be accurate. Because iOS has no open source component though... we don't know.)
As a GrapheneOS user, having the fastest hardware is not the goal. Pixels can be purchased for a very reasonable price second-hand or from discount resellers. Apple's hardware is indeed remarkable and iOS being closed-source is not the root of the issue - it's that they insist on a heavily locked down bootloader, so I will not for a moment consider Apple unless by some miracle they open up their phones to third-party OSes.
I can agree with most of that. I like the Mac a lot more than I like the iPhone. But a Mac can install Linux. They also used to run Windows, and I think they can run Windows ARM but I'm not sure. I've also heard Windows ARM is not very good anyway.
Fortunately, Macs don't require iPhones. My wife has an Android phone and has no problem with using Mac. She just doesn't get Universal Clipboard, which is nice, but not a deal breaker to lose if you have other reasons to prefer Android.
wait....you think....having an iphone spares you from all of that? oh you sweet summer child.
No, probably not. I'm just saying Google absolutely does sell your personal information. Apple says they don't. What I said was that because it's closed source, we don't actually know.
We do know that Apple does track certain things. Telemetry, they all do it. What we don't know is if they sell personally identifiable information. I think if it could be proven that they do, someone could sue over their "Privacy. That's iPhone" campaign. They certainly wouldn't be able to use it in any country where false advertising is not legal.
The difference between a computer company and an advertising agency, I suppose.
i don't trust apple to protect my data and sell it as much as alphabet does.
I haven't quite pulled the trigger on installing Graphene yet. How is it.as a daily driver?
Two years, I barely notice. 1 in 30 apps has an issue, then I click the switch remove system memory protections and it works.
It's the best option.
I second this. Been using GOS for almost a year. One pretty big drawback is that it's not compatible with my insulin pump app, so now I carry around a 2nd device. Some banking apps aren't compatible as well. Wells Fargo and Amex work for me but Chase doesn't. The increased security and privacy is very noticeable, the inconveniences are worth it imo.
Wells fargo and Chase are stealing your money.
Join a credit union
Everybody's stealing my money.
Weird. Amex works for me. My banking apps require the memlock protection turned off in settings, and so does my parking app. Otherwise, that's it.
Hopefully it's just for additional stats and options. Would be quite diabolical for a life-saving device to depend on an app that demands regular Android.
The app that I was using to fully control it doesn't work, which is why I carry around the OEM receiver/transmitter for the pump now. My pump would not function without one of those two options.
I've been using it for about a year now. The only differences I noticed were entirely positive.
Agreed. It's nice having a phone with the software you want on it.
It's nice, but Pixels are so expensive.
Getting a used one is cheaper AND you don´t give money directly to Google. Or wait a year or two for the other Graphene phones.
They're even expensive used.
They did go up a bit this year but if you set alerts on your preferred marketplace and be patient, you'll find one at a decent price. I started shopping pixels last November and pulled the trigger on my preferred model by first week of January. Worth the wait all the way.
any phone over 300 dollars CAD is expensive. i don't need 4K and all that other shit
You're fucking up, and I say that in the kindest way.
You'll spend 2 days figuring out issues if you even have them.
It also has one of the coolest installers of all time.
Save what you need to and jump ship.
The show stopers are some banking apps that don't work and tap to pay
If that's not an issue for you, then I've had zero problems running GOS. You'll spend the first week figuring out using different profiles, the cleaner interface, installing things that you actually want. But after that you won't even notice the difference.
I use Android auto, I have Google installed in a profile for it, everything else is clean without Google, everything works fine.
So like, you create a sandboxes profile for Google and log into that in your car and use android auto, get to your destination and switch back?
Kinda but you have 3 profiles active at once:
So google just lives in one and the others are clean. From a usage perspective it's seamless
🤩
How long does it take to switch between profiles? Or am I still misunderstanding since you said they all are active at once? So like each of those profiles are available at the same time, but are sandboxed from each other?
Correct. For the three special profiles, they're all active at the same time, you can use them like you would any other app. They're just isolated from each other.
Gos also has other user profiles, where you have to swipe down and swap users, those are more cumbersome, but more isolated. But for daily driving, you have three profiles you can use simultaneously, at the same time, no login, no log out, and they're isolated from each other
For instance, you can have two versions of WhatsApp running at the same time, one in each profile, and they can't see each other, but you can swap between them like any other two apps.
Well damn, that's even better than I thought!
I've been using it since the Pixel 3 days. Tap to pay doesn't work, and some people have reported banking apps not working, although my banking apps do work. Also, certain pixel-exclusive features like now playing don't work. And you are going to need to install play services or other Google components if you want stuff like notifications in various apps or text-to-speech and speech-to-text in the browser, etc. Aside from that, it's incredible. Works perfectly.
no tap to pay and some banking apps dont work. but honestly, you should be ditching google stuff altogehter if your going that far of replacing stock android and only use FOSS apps you trust from f-droid
No more new hardware beyond Pixel 9 for the foreseeable future though, and Graphene's ODM partner (if it even pans out) will be using Qualcomm chips, which is a US military contractor and not known for good security.