skarn

This! If you have good hardware that works, it's good to keep it if possible. My smartwatch/activity tracker is indeed a Garmin Instinct 2s with Gadgetbridge. It really does most of what the proprietary app does, and gives you near absolute control over your data.

Can't really anyone read? Poster above said Portugal or Poland cost 1/10th of the budget above. And plainly no. In Poland you might get away with spending half.

Has anyone here considered that he simply may be funding subversive groups in a few countries?

Yes, that's reasonable. That's what e.g. mailbox.org does. And they publish periodic reports on how many requests they receive, how many they successfully reject, and how many they have to follow.

15000€/year gross? In Portugal that's slightly above minimum wage. Might be okay in the middle of the countryside. There should be plenty of skilled programmers racing to live there, right? The cost of living in cities is quite inflated by digital nomads and wealthy retirees and is starting to be unaffordable for Portuguese. Edit: 15000 USD is 12800 EUR, that's a few cents an hour above minimum wage. And Poland costs already more than that BTW.

Having read my share of early Soviet era sci-fi, I think you’re wrong.

Hell no. It’s nowhere near 50/50. In my experience the great moments are far more frequent than the one where you want to defenestrate them. The relationship with them is however massively unequal, in that you basically owe all the support and they owe you next to nothing (at least at the start). And unlike with partners and friends, you are supposed to have and maintain authority over them, and foster their growth, often against their whishes. So it’s a lot of work. But I for instance don’t understand why people get dogs.

Cowabunga!

Bifteki!

First a technical thing which is not obvious to me. I understand that the general, non-proprietary Android system service would uses a privacy preserving service like BeaconDB. From what I understand, Google offers an alternative, proprietary, location API in its Play Services. Is that one also prevented from giving your location to Google of you’re using Sandboxed Google Play? It’s an honest question. I assumed that the provider option I had in MicroG was exactly for that purpose, but I could be wrong. Next, a small rant. Bloody hell, I really do appreciate your politeness, but how is it that every damn article about privacy starts with threat modeling, but every discussion about privacy ends with “yeah but if your threat model does not require QubesOS you’re doing it wrong”? (I use Arch BTW)

I use Arch, BTW.

GrapheneOS requires I think a few other things, like the possibility to completely disable the data lines in the USB port, and a bunch of others. The problem with Fairphone is that they have rather high demands (e.g. long term support for hardware, better production practices) but they are a rather small outfit, so the default answer from parts manufacturers is “talk to the hand”. As they grow they’ll become more interesting I would argue that Fairphone with /e/OS is a combination of a committed/sustainable manufacturer with a trustworthy OS. It does not actively spy or screw with you, and it tries to prevent snooping in many places. Of course it’s not nearly as security hardened as GrapheneOS, so that may be an unacceptable compromise to come.

I wouldn’t say that it’s pretty similar. They have rather different goals and feature sets. Sent from my FP4 with /e/OS.

If you want to convince GOS users to occasionally drop their sense of superiority, it looks like you have your work cut out for you.

My wife’s previous phone was a Moto One Hyper. Really good quality device.

Thank you for reading that, and for supporting the idea that these topics are worth discussing about, and different people can reach different conclusions. Also notice a couple more useful posts in the responses to my post, courtesy of a users who decided to verbally disagree instead of just downvoting.

Being open source is not the only benefit of MicroG. It massages some (many) of the queries, removing as many bits of identifying information as possible. It lets you replace Google Location services with BeaconDB. And some other stuff. These are all privacy wins. Practical ways to maintain as much of the functionality as possible, as much of the convenience, while minimizing the amount of information that is sent to Google (among others). They come with a compromise in security. So this comes down to threat modeling. To use the naming from privacyguides.org, is your model includes “surveillance capitalism” but not “targeted attacks” then MicroG might even be better. e/OS, while far from perfect, also adds a feature that blocks requests from tracking services using a blocklist. You can get that in 50 other ways, but this one does not drain my battery at 3x the speed, so I like it. I do not claim that /e/OS is “better” than GrapheneOS, just that other ROMs can be a very good choice, depending of the user. There is a reason why GrapheneOS is the golden standard, and if I were a journalist or activist in many parts of the world I would definitely stick to that and only that. But that is why threat modeling exists. My threat model allows me a little more latitude, so I am not restricted to buying Pixels in an era when Google seems to be slowly undermining GrapheneOS, and I can choose a different manufacturer with better ethics. Among other things.

Yeah, /e/OS too, and so I assume also LineageOS and the rest.