112
Is Google Pixel actually good for privacy?
(lemmy.basedcount.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
112 points (95.2% liked)
Privacy
32169 readers
366 users here now
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
- Don't promote proprietary software
- 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 :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
I've been using LineageOS+MicroG with very little google software (only maps) and it's been working great. Any reason I should switch to Graphene? I noticed the main dev seemed to have some disputes and interesting personality characteristics, so I was a bit hesitant to adopt. I also had an irrational "I wouldn't be surprised if 3 letter agencies are involved" vibe about Graphene, but nothing concrete.
That's quite a statement, are you sure about that? The Graphene team has done a considerable amount of work sandboxing the environment of Google Play, both in memory, permission structure, and IO access that MicroG completely blows past. Given how the Graphene sandboxing works, I actually can't think of a scenario where the statement that MicroG is more private than Graphene sandboxed Google Play. In either scenario you don't have to log in, so I'd much rather have an environment that has been isolated than tooling that still has tendrils reaching into the main OS itself (MicroG).
Yeah one important key is not logging in. If you use Aurora store to install apps, and don't log into any Google apps, Google can't be certain of your identity enough to tie it to your previous Google account. I guess they could probabilistically match you based on stuff like your location in Maps app vs. a previous normie device known to be "you".
One thing I'd like to test is the implications if you log into Gmail on the hardened Vanadium browser and then log out. I would think it would still be pretty safe on Graphene because Google would have no access to other apps activities on the device and even location requests don't get routed to Googles geolocation service unless the user specifically turns that back on.