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Janet Vertesi

What a day today! It's a perfect day to follow the and SECURE THE HELL OUT OF YOUR CELL PHONE RIGHT NOW.

Today. Before you waste another minute.

It sure beats doomscrolling today. And it's an actual action you can take to secure your personal life and protect your friends and family in the years ahead.

optoutproject.net/secure-phone

www.optoutproject.netDay Twenty: Fix your Phone - The Opt Out ProjectYou are walking around everyday with a massive tracking device that is hemmorhaging data all over the place, in your…

@cyberlyra replacing Android with GrapheneOS is not something I can do in just a minute no matter how much my ADHD insists it definitely is

@cyberlyra - great article and great series, thanks for all your time putting this together. I will give a shout out on Android for the apps AppManager and TrackerControl, available in the F-droid store, that allow one to see what apps are "phoning home", and in the case of TrackerControl, often enabling blocking the device from sending out data to these unwanted contacts. trackercontrol.org/

TrackerControl for AndroidTrackerControl for AndroidTrackerControl allows you to monitor and control the widespread, ongoing, hidden data collection in mobile apps about user behaviour (tracking).

@cyberlyra

Projects I think worth mentioning:

If you can't flash a custom ROM to your phone (looking at you Samsung and Verizon Pixel), an app called Universal Android Debloater Next is an amazing privacy tool. Its impossible to brick anything as its not touching the system write protected partition. Reset the phone and the phone is back to stock. Unfortunately, this has one downside: updates unvariably require you to do this again. I do this each month following security updates and generally it's only one or two things to remove again.

github.com/Universal-Debloater

RethinkDNS is amazing for Android. It hijacks the system VPN to become the ultimate firewall. You can get as granular as IP address blocking for individual apps or as brute force as just blocking an app entirely. It can connect to multiple VPN networks and selectively route traffic through different tunnels based on the app requesting the traffic. Or you can just have it hand traffic out to the local network untouched after the rules you set in place. They also have local DNS blocklists as well. I have almost every system app blocked from accessing network services.

Also, Android works just fine, contrary to what Google tries to say when setting it up, without a Google account. You lose Google services but honestly that's a plus in my book.

Shout out to Aurora Store, F-Droid, and Obtanium for making the Google Play Store redundant for most things beyond paid Play Store apps

Cross-platform GUI written in Rust using ADB to debloat non-rooted Android devices. Improve your privacy, the security and battery life of your device. - Universal-Debloater-Alliance/universal-andr...
GitHubGitHub - Universal-Debloater-Alliance/universal-android-debloater-next-generation: Cross-platform GUI written in Rust using ADB to debloat non-rooted Android devices. Improve your privacy, the security and battery life of your device.Cross-platform GUI written in Rust using ADB to debloat non-rooted Android devices. Improve your privacy, the security and battery life of your device. - Universal-Debloater-Alliance/universal-andr...

@danni_storm Thank you this is super helpful. I only touch Androids very sparingly (mostly to flash over to alterantive OS's) so domain knowledge is helpful.

@cyberlyra Sorry, this is a political problem. I lived years with a de-Googled phone, and many key apps (carsharing, banking) will not work without Android. The solution is not as an individual to escape but to demand that Google is broken up and heavily regulate the basic infrastructure that makes our phones run

@thomasjorgensen Indeed, I have heard this argument before.

I completely agree that requiring individuals to take responsibility for a collective problem and failure of regulation is inapprorpriate. Yet I disagree that there is only one path to a political solution.

Buildling momentum among more individuals who embrace and clamor for alternatives and who can learn to see the problems in these tech ecosystems means:
a) more alternatives
b) less market share for bad actors and
c) more political momentum among an emergent community to mobilize for change in infrastructure, monopoly, and regulation.

It can't just be techies invested in solutions. We need many more allies.

In other words, I don't see this as an individual project, but the seeds of a social movement. And that is another valid avenue toward agitating for and producing political and regulatory change.

@cyberlyra

Not sure if you open to suggestions for changes?

Although theres dark patterns leading you to login or create a Google account can skip past that when setting up a new/factory reset phone. But its not always great using a phone like that

This is a decent comparison of alternative AOSP operating systems
eylenburg.github.io/android_co

Finally its possible to simply install GrapheneOS from a web browser, by clicking a few buttons on a web page. Can even do it from another android device

eylenburg.github.ioComparison of Android-based Operating SystemsComparison of Android-based Operating Systems

@cyberlyra After a few years with Sailfish I bought recently another android phone. It's really full of annoyances. I feel really comfortable with my sailfish, efective and focused on what a phone should be. Maybe it can be polished, but I can't imagine leaving sailfish right now. Cool project btw