It's a good article. Those who prefer to have their phones disconnected from Google for whatever reason at least have some options to limit exposure, but unfort

It's a good article. Those who prefer to have their phones disconnected from Google for whatever reason at least have some options to limit exposure, but unfortunately, preventing the mobile web browser in the phone from leaking information like location, history, and habits to Google (and plenty of others) is going to be really tough. Also, the article glossed over an important issue; the need to use closed-source proprietary binary blob drivers to make the hardware usable. With drivers running in kernel space, the potential damage of an intentionally or unintentionally bad driver is pretty much unlimited. The most problematic drivers are usually the graphics drivers due to complexity and their impact on both system and battery performance. Since the companies making the graphics chips (well, they're often just graphics cores within the main processor IC rather than separate chips) like nVidia, Qualcomm, Arm Inc (mali), and Broadcom (to a lesser degree lately) refuse to release the documentation necessary for open source hackers to write drivers, tons of unnecessary effort is wasted in attempts to reverse engineer the binary blob drivers so open source drivers can be written. There are quite a few efforts under way to produce open source drivers for various graphics "chips" on various types of ARM systems. Here are a few links I've collected: http://freedreno.github.io/ http://freedreno.github.io/ http://bloggingthemonkey.blogspot.com/ http://bloggingthemonkey.blogspot.com/ http://limadriver.org/ http://limadriver.org/ https://gitorious.org/lima https://gitorious.org/lima https://github.com/grate-driver/grate/wiki https://github.com/grate-driver/grate/wiki https://github.com/laanwj/etna_viv/wiki https://github.com/laanwj/etna_viv/wiki http://www.raspberrypi.org/a-birthday-present-from-broadcom/ http://www.raspberrypi.org/a-birthday-present-from-broadcom/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7320828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7320828 I haven't seen anyone succeed in making a fully open source blob-free phone yet, but people are working towards that goal. Unfortunately, even if open source devs eventually solve all of the blob driver (and chip documentation!) problems, there will still be an unknown, untested, and unaudited chunk of code running on phones that cannot be legally altered; it's the baseband processor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseband_processor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseband_processor Since the baseband processor controls the radio(s), it's actually against the law (FCC in the US) to modify the broadcast/receive power levels or frequencies. As such, each baseband processor has to be tested and certified by the FCC, and any change means it has to be tested and recertified again.