With the lack of any other viable option, I struggle to see the point of the arguement.

Agreed. The Google implementations are there for folks who absolutely cannot go without certain apps only available from the Play Store. Upon installation, all that’s there is the OS with the necessary apps (camera, phone, browser, etc) with the security on these individual apps additionally patched.

With the sandboxing of Google Play and Services AND the option to further house these apps from the Play Store in a separate profile, you have a perfectly working device that the individual user can customise to their needs.

Its a great project and a real asset to the FOSS, privacy and security community against big tech/govt surveillance.

The phone is only as good as how you choose to set it up and use it.

This is old news, from 2022!!

Google then sells your data to data brokers and anyone willing to pay a pretty penny. In the end it doesnt matter if your device is only bleeding out of the Google hole exclusively because everyone else can just buy it off Google (who probably does a better job at deanonymising and aggregating your data.

My gripe with Greenify is its not open sourced amd has a bunch trackers. https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/com.oasisfeng.greenify/latest/

They are the caricature of organised religions.

The need for a free internet that is community-regulated cannot be more urgent. This move will indiscriminately ban any kind of speech, important traditional therapies, etc. Implemented, this will be a huge loss to our collective knowledge and ability to organise as communities.

Quick question: How does one set up encryption while using the Tor browser for things like searches and regular browsing (research, etc)? Would be useful to know. Appreciate.

LINE - just the tip of the iceberg of privacy and security concerns. https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/jp.naver.line.android/latest/

Agreed. May best to get family and close friends on Signal right away. Telegram is horribly unsecure.

Signal desktop is designed to be a stand alone app that uses the phone phone to first verify the connection via QR but after that relays messages, calls, erc direct from and to the server, inrependently of the phone app.

Opening para from a NYT article on the Waldorf School in Silicon Valley:

"The chief technology officer of eBay sends his children to a nine-classroom school here. So do employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard.

But the school’s chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home."

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/technology/at-waldorf-school-in-silicon-valley-technology-can-wait.html

If you are reffering to Signal then both app and server are open source. Just that the server is centralised.

For community building, try checking out SimpleX. Its open source and has an interesting take on anonynity. Plus it doesnt require phone numbers to create a user identity.

As for either being censorship resistant, I am unsure how we’ll they’d cope. But my guess is they would perform just fine in most scenarios.

Libre Wolf with uBlock preinstalled could be what you need.