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Degoogled phones running privacy oriented OS

de-googled.com

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Re: Degoogled phones running privacy oriented OS

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good for the magnification, but I need a full screen reader with a tts engine.

Looking in the settings, I see there is something called TalkBack: ``` When Talkback is on, it provides spoken feedback so that you can use your device without looking at the screen. Talkback is intended for situations or people who have difficulty seeing the screen. ```

thanks, good to know

Re: Degoogled phones running privacy oriented OS

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet somehow the US government can't even prevent me from downloading copyrighted torrents.

There's a difference between stopping an action at a societal level, and targeting an individual through any means necessary.

> There's a difference between stopping an action at a societal level, and targeting an individual through any means necessary.

Yup. It always amazes me how often people conflate, "The U.S. government can't be bothered to stop people from doing X" with, "The U.S. government can't stop people from doing X". If you want to test this out, try not paying federal taxes for a while.

Re: Degoogled phones running privacy oriented OS

#75
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a difference between stopping an action at a societal level, and targeting an individual through any means necessary.

> There's a difference between stopping an action at a societal level, and targeting an individual through any means necessary. Yup. It always amazes me how often people conflate, "The U.S. government can't be bothered to stop people from doing X" with, "The U.S. government can't stop people from doing X". If you want to test this out, try not paying federal taxes for a while.

There are people getting away with tax fraud all the time.

Re: Degoogled phones running privacy oriented OS

#76
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution I have is a wired-in, locked down raspberry pi where I have a separate email account, PGP key, etc. Phones are definitely a writeoff though, with the possible exception of the PinePhone. If memory serves, the 4g modem lacks direct memory access which improves security substantially.

Can anyone be sure an enormous open source project like a Linux distribution isn't backdoored?

For something with a lot of eyes on it, like the Linux kernel, I would think it unlikely. It's the smaller projects with no active maintenance that would be easier targets.

At the end of the day, all operating systems have exploits. Nation states pay big money online to buy the exploits for their own use, before the good guys find them and out them. If your system is being compromised by a nation state, it is much more likely buy a purchased exploit than by an explicitly-added backdoor.

I can't say anything about intercepting your communications, though. The NSA might or might not have technical ways of decrypting some of your encrypted communications.

Re: Degoogled phones running privacy oriented OS

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These aims shouldn't be incompatible. The device should be able to use purely local location data to tag the photos, and then the photos should only be made available to applications the user trusts. We've been so brainwashed by saas companies to expect that simply collecting information implies sharing it. The point of distributions like this is to remove those cloud dependencies while retaining functionality, and p…

Fine if you decide to have GPS enabled for photos, but it should be opt in rather than opt out. Anyone who manages to get access to your images could reconstruct a map of where and when you have been

Google camera prompts about saving location on first startup. Graphene's default camera defaults to "off".

I naively assumed, given how GPS works, that I could enable location access, and disable network access for the camera app, and that it would still be capable of copying two floating point numbers from the local GPS chipset to the exif data.

Instead, it wants to call out to some questionable network services.

I'm clearly not the only one that wants this feature. Graphene even includes a reimplementation of the necessary Google API.

However, it (and the original google implementation) are flaky. This all "just worked" on my iPhone and (before that) Windows Phone. It didn't even occur to me that it was a thing that could be screwed up.

Re: Degoogled phones running privacy oriented OS

#78

Is this real? It has the appeal of a typical scam/phishing site ... and I am not just talking about the design. Some things like business address appear to be placeholders.

Hi, I understand the doubters. Please note that the business address is the building where we currently work from :). As written on the website "This is not our full time job (may be one day), but we enjoy seeing others realize that they have options when it comes to their phone."; this is why we haven't specified the full address (with room/floor). We are based in Hong Kong but we have also have other people helping us from other parts of Europe and US. Cheers

Re: Degoogled phones running privacy oriented OS

#79

This will probably be buried because I'm too late to the party... This website is probably just selling you the results of following a guide from a guy who goes by Michael Bazzel. He has a podcast (Privacy, Security, and OSINT show) and releases a privacy book every other year, alternating with an OSINT book. He also has good guides on his website and they sell all sorts of training. Anyway, if you want it done right…

You are completely right, as we write on the website the most secure and private way to degoogle your phone is to do it yourself. The phones we sell we the pre-installed OS are more for people that are not technically able to do it themselves.

Re: Degoogled phones running privacy oriented OS

#80
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution I have is a wired-in, locked down raspberry pi where I have a separate email account, PGP key, etc. Phones are definitely a writeoff though, with the possible exception of the PinePhone. If memory serves, the 4g modem lacks direct memory access which improves security substantially.

Can anyone be sure an enormous open source project like a Linux distribution isn't backdoored?

no
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