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!!

You seddit right!!

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.

Google is paying copius sums of money to in AdBlock Plus (asuming this is the extension you are speaking about), makes sense to avoid it completely and run uBlock Origin.

https://www.insider.com/why-google-has-to-build-its-own-adblocker-2017-4

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.

Use Pixel Droid. Download from F-Droid.

The US can’t even fess up and and rectify the sysyemic violence happening domestically to its first nation people, blacks and people of colour. How about they begin there and then atone for what they’ve done to the rest of the world. Ukraine is a US proxy war with Russia. And war keeps the US rich and powerful. Couple that with a crumbling education system, social support and religion and you have a decent supply of young men and woment to enlist. Nobody outside the US would buy the nonsense you just spewed. Go pick your cherries elsewhere.

Agreed. We dont hear enough for the US to confess to its war crimes, many of which are still going on today.

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.

I am with you. I do wish we lived in an ideal world and in ideal times.

State-approved “peaceful protest” is not protest. This post is a criticism over the idea of state-approved dissent and isnt about condoning violence.

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

Unless you want to run communities there I wont bother with it. I feel everything from setting up accounts (anonymously) to getting people to join, works better in SimpleX and Session. I’d even be happy using SimpleX as my everyday messenger. Matrix is a little clunky and the fact that all conversations get duplicated on the primary Matrix servers is cause for concern.

With Signal and SimpleX, servers are used only for relaying messages beteeen users - messages which are encrypted on the device.

In the end you are going to be sacrificing something, and the last thing you’d want to sacrifice is privacy and security.

If I was pushed to list my go to, it’ll be Signal for chats with people I know: because its open source, battle-tested against adversities, and can be set up by anyone who understands how ro use Whastsapp / Telegram.

For communitties (and even as a daily text solution beteeen collaborators or anyone you dont want to exchange numbers with), I’d use SimpleX as it has a lot of in-built anonymity and decent privacy (so far - its a fairly new project).

Theres just too much fuzziness round Matrix for anyone to trust it.