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GrapheneOS recommended for domestic abuse victims

privacypros.com.au

81–90 of 228 posts

Re: GrapheneOS recommended for domestic abuse victims

#81

Why care about what Google know about you, in case of domestic abuse ? It's not like Google is going to sell your tracking data to abuser. There are many reasons to get rid of Google altogether, I just don't understand this one.

> It's not like Google is going to sell your tracking data to abuser. No, that's exactly the fear. With enough disclaimers and third parties involved, a motivated, highly intelligent and rich attacker with the right connections could get that information.

Explain how (in comparison to GrapheneOS) please.

Re: GrapheneOS recommended for domestic abuse victims

#82

It's absolutely insane that phones have online accounts deeply integrated into the OS. You need to give Apple your phone number to download any apps on iOS. For example: Say anyone that downloaded IceBlock commited crime, Apple could give the govt everyone who downloaded its phone number, the govt could get the realtime location of everyone based on their phone number from the carrier. And that's not even mentioning…

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I meant the government deciding that downloading iceblock is a crime, because it shouldn't be, not that people who downloaded it used it commit crimes. Apologies for not being clear if that's how you were interpreting.

Re: GrapheneOS recommended for domestic abuse victims

#83
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not like Google is going to sell your tracking data to abuser. No, that's exactly the fear. With enough disclaimers and third parties involved, a motivated, highly intelligent and rich attacker with the right connections could get that information.

Explain how (in comparison to GrapheneOS) please.

Zero Google services ship by default.

Re: GrapheneOS recommended for domestic abuse victims

#84

Why care about what Google know about you, in case of domestic abuse ? It's not like Google is going to sell your tracking data to abuser. There are many reasons to get rid of Google altogether, I just don't understand this one.

Any data collected can be abused. This is like saying why care about what flock knows about you, when it's been used by far too many police to stalk their romantic interests.

Police can obtain data from Google. Police can be abusers or friends with abusers.

Re: GrapheneOS recommended for domestic abuse victims

#85
post #16
post #10

Can someone explain this? I've used custom ROMs back in the day (Cyanogen!) but I'm not familiar with GrapheneOS. I remember Cyanogen ships without Google Play etc., right? (Because if you install Google Services and a bunch of crap from their store (theirs and otherwise) that spies on you, it defeats the purpose of a privacy preserving OS. So I'm assuming Graphene is at least as strict as that? (Well Cyanogen at lea…

[flagged]

Have you got a link to anything about hiding parallel accounts? I use GrapheneOS, and don't see anything in the UI about it. Am I looking for the wrong thing? From what I can see, it's the same as stock Android's user switching, which has obvious UI elements about switching session.

I see hidden profiles is an open issue, here: https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/5003

Re: GrapheneOS recommended for domestic abuse victims

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's an article explaining why one should care: https://privacypros.com.au/privacy-hub/articles/dv-safe-phon... The tl;dr is that you can either share this data by accident through some sort of "locate my family" app, or because your abuser gets access to your Google/Apple account (for instance because you're signed in on another device they have access to). The threat model here can be: domestic abuse victim flees…

Even on grapheneos you got to install the play store and play services to get most app to work, which mean connecting to a Google account. Technically you can use fdroid, Aurora store, or only use stock applications but if we are serious, not all domestic abuse victims are also geeks that know how to do all these things. They will need their apps, for instance for social security. Also, many people use their phone to…

Play store is not a significant privacy risk. It is a huge improvement being sandboxed, not installed by default, not given permissions by default.

Grapheneos has 99.99% app compatibility and over 90% of banking apps are compatible.

Re: GrapheneOS recommended for domestic abuse victims

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remote attestation is not just insane, it's the technology that will end free computing as we know it today. What good is free software if using it marks our devices as untrusted and gets us banned from every service out there? Gets us ostracized from digital society? Because we "tampered" with the device? We should be able to run whatever software we want and they should be none the wiser. Instead, we are part of th…

>What good is free software if using it marks our devices as untrusted That is not what remote attestation is for. The operating system maintains isolation between apps, so a free software app being installed doesn't mean an app that needs high security is compromised.

I think you've misunderstood. It's not an app problem. The problem is that it makes Free Software OSes unviable. The copy of Android you compile and install yourself - or your copy of desktop Linux where you upgraded the kernel yourself - will never pass remote attestation, and it gives both the attestation provider and software that checks attestation the ability to unilaterally shut out any OS they like with no workaround, even those that do pass attestation.

In a world of deeply untrustworthy Big Tech, and trend of governments, banks and other basic services needed to exist in society relying on apps and in the future, websites that use remote attestation, that is very troubling.

There are better ways of dealing with the bad actors problem, but Big Tech has chosen violence.

Re: GrapheneOS recommended for domestic abuse victims

#89

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Grapheneos is the least shady OS. Why would a mass surveillance agency compromise hardware when they can simply spy at the software level though Google's deep insights into devices?

Those Android distributions you refer to are not up to date, don't fully remove Google services, don't ship patches fast, don't improve exploit protections, have worse compatibility, don't make Google's services more private by running them in a sandbox, dont add additional important permissions.

Grapheneos ships security updates faster then Google on pixels. If you want the best protection against zero days or mass surveillance, grapheneos is the best option.

Grapheneos is fully run on donations and has provided information in various posts. Most crypto donations by volume are in Monero, Eth and Bitcoin have a few large donations. They are registered as a legal entity in Canada.

Re: GrapheneOS recommended for domestic abuse victims

#90

It's absolutely insane that phones have online accounts deeply integrated into the OS. You need to give Apple your phone number to download any apps on iOS. For example: Say anyone that downloaded IceBlock commited crime, Apple could give the govt everyone who downloaded its phone number, the govt could get the realtime location of everyone based on their phone number from the carrier. And that's not even mentioning…

Don't phones have identifiers outside of phone number anyway? I feel like you have to trust the hardware/os vendor anyway. So if you don't trust apple to not misbehave, maybe not getting an iphone is better than chasing the whole phone-number idea.
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