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It's weird that you think that you're "empowering" yourself when you carry a device that you don't control and which records everything about you. Keeping a ce
by autoexec 3y ago
It's weird that you think that you're "empowering" yourself when you carry a device that you don't control and which records everything about you.
Keeping a cell phone involves massive trade offs where you have to give up a lot and expose yourself to tons of new risks in exchange for connectivity. There are other abilities you get with a phone but for most of those it would be better to use a device like a laptop which would be a little more cumbersome but less harmful and more powerful.
A cell phone gives you some things while also taking many things from you. Sometimes the most empowering thing you can do is leave it at home.
- rossy 3y agoThis is just learned helplessness. If loss of control is a concern for you, there are FOSS privacy-focused operating systems you can install to your phone. You do control your phone.
- lrvick 3y agoThere are zero operating systems you can install on modern smartphone hardware that give you full control of your phone. Even the most open of Android Roms still require giving a bunch of proprietary drivers, firmware, and applications root access for the most basic of hardware functionality. A major reason I gave up on phones and got a tiny laptop to run qubes on.
- rossy 3y agoThere's a difference between avoiding the very-real tracking for targeted advertising that companies like Google do, and the paranoia that your camera blobs are tracking you just because they're proprietary. > proprietary [...] firmware Your tiny laptop has this too. > proprietary [...] applications There are plenty of AOSP-derived ROMs without this.
- lrvick 3y agoShow me even one AOSP based ROM that does not ship with proprietary software that runs on modern hardware. The vendor partition is a black hole of poorly understood and mostly proprietary garbage that can do whatever it wants. Also if you do not ship your ROMs without OMA-DM and similar malware, you are not even permitted to connect to some cell networks. There are a comical number of apps and blobs copied from the vendor partition of stock roms to make most of those "open source" roms function on recent devices. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/GrapheneOS/vendor_state/14/sunfish.json https://raw.githubusercontent.com/GrapheneOS/vendor_state/14... At least on a laptop I can run QubesOS to hypervisor isolate the rare hardware that requires blobs, like wifi.
- rossy 3y agoNot Android but I think PinePhone and Librem 5 meet your standards. AFAIK they have proprietary WiFi/BT firmware, but they use virtualization (IOMMU) to protect themselves from it. I don't see how that's fundamentally different to your Qubes laptop. Also I think you're ignoring my first point. I don't think any of this paranoia is reasonable. Unless you're being targeted by state actors, none of it is necessary to fill a reasonable definition of "controlling your device." This is all in response to an article about a child who doesn't like phones because he doesn't like social media. The adtech machine that powers social media is pervasive and it has its fingers in proprietary smartphone OSes, but it doesn't have its fingers in AOSP ROMs like GrapheneOS, so installing one of those is an easy and achievable way of avoiding it. Whether it's possible to remove every last drop of proprietary software is a side-issue here.
- autoexec 3y agoAs another commenter pointed you, you don't have the ability to fully control your phone hardware, but also even allowing yourself to be tracked by the cellular network is a trade off. Your OS will probably not save you from stingrays and dirtboxes