The US government has really shaken my trust in services like these (which I guess is their ultimate goal). With the risk that these "secure devices" type sellers are fronts I think it's best practice for anyone wanting a de-googeled device to just buy one of these phones in store with cash and then load the custom OS themselves, it requires the level of technical knowledge you'd need to even know you'd want something like this in the first place so anyone that wants it can easily do it.
Also I find it ironic that this website is full of Google requests, we've got YouTube, google translate, gstatic content, google recaptcha, googleapis, and google fonts requests all just on the landing page alone.
Doesn't help that it's sending data to Facebook either.
The Google threat you can still mitigate or even escape.
The US government one you can't. Sorry. As much as I wish I were wrong, the hardware is probably backdoored, so no custom OS will save you. Even if it weren't a phone by design has to communicate with radio towers (backdoored) and even if you get the most secure phone in the world you still have to communicate and pay for some exotic hardware. Guess who will get added to a list of suspicious people to put an extra eye on?
My first “tech” job out of college was tech support for a VPN company. Brilliant little operation reselling bandwidth to folks visiting China and those who wanted to hide their traffic. One reason I really respected the CEO and CTO is that they told us specifically to never, ever promise that we made people “anonymous on the Internet.” Even when they went to no-logs — a big step for them — they still maintained that we always stick to this line: “You are never anonymous on the Internet. Our service is to help you create a more private connection, one that makes it more difficult for you to be tracked by corporations and hackers. It does not protect you against state-level actors.” When I discussed this with them, they had an even more candid take: “Look, if you have the US government after you, you’re already fucked. No level of encryption is going to help.”
> There's a difference between stopping an action at a societal level, and targeting an individual through any means necessary.
Yup. It always amazes me how often people conflate, "The U.S. government can't be bothered to stop people from doing X" with, "The U.S. government can't stop people from doing X". If you want to test this out, try not paying federal taxes for a while.
The solution I have is a wired-in, locked down raspberry pi where I have a separate email account, PGP key, etc. Phones are definitely a writeoff though, with the possible exception of the PinePhone. If memory serves, the 4g modem lacks direct memory access which improves security substantially.
For something with a lot of eyes on it, like the Linux kernel, I would think it unlikely. It's the smaller projects with no active maintenance that would be easier targets.
At the end of the day, all operating systems have exploits. Nation states pay big money online to buy the exploits for their own use, before the good guys find them and out them. If your system is being compromised by a nation state, it is much more likely buy a purchased exploit than by an explicitly-added backdoor.
I can't say anything about intercepting your communications, though. The NSA might or might not have technical ways of decrypting some of your encrypted communications.
Those components in that PinePhone, they come from China. Are you sure that flash module does not contain a backdoor? What about the SoC, PinePhone uses Rockchip, the full name of that company is Fuzhou Rockchip Electronics Co., Ltd.. Are you sure the SoC is free from backdoors? Why even limit the search to complex components when a simple SMD capacitor is more than big enough to contain a low-power radio. Add some 'intelligence' and the thing will be able to deduce whether it is mounted in a position which gives it access to interesting data - the power path being a good candidate - to be transmitted on demand. The same would have been true had the components come from any other country but as it stands nearly all such components come from China.
Being a little flippant here, but it is the British and American govts I worry about more. At least I don't share a language with Chinese spies!
Plus, I'm fairly sure the pi is a known quantity. PinePhone less so. Probably the most secure thing you can do is encrypt messages to your friends, send them as a printed out QR code, and make your signature say "burn after reading". Bonus points for a printer that is old enough that it isn't laden with spyware.
The telcos can be mitigated by using burner SIM's that you rarely turn on. Use VOIP numbers with SIP phone clients. Only turn off airplane mode when needed.
I know somebody who refuses to use any encryption anywhere because he is worried that he will raise suspicion.
ArcaneOS comes to my mind as a recent example. I always suggest anyone to load the custom ROM themselves or ask someone you know IRL to do it for you.
If you think you do not have the expertise to do it, you should ask for help. There is a good chance that you will do something wrong and compeletely brick the phone.
He ow can you trust the ArcaneOS releases to not be free from backdoors, etc?
Even if you build the image yourself you're still relying on someone else's code. It reminds me of the office space quote, "no one can check all that code. Thumbs up their a$$es."
> I think it's best practice for anyone wanting a de-googeled device to just buy one of these phones in store with cash and then load the custom OS themselves
The best practice is to abandon locked down Android phones and switch to GNU/Linux phones (Librem 5 and Pinephone).
Linux phones are entirely impractical for most people. I live in India, and there are several apps I need to use to access government services that only work on iOS and Android. Some services aren't even available over the Web.
We're at a point where any successful mobile OS will at least need to support running Android apps, preferably directly from the Play Store. I suspect this is one of the reasons Microsoft is adding Android support to Windows 11.
I like the idea of an entirely FOSS phone, but sadly that ship sailed years ago.
Waydroid allows Linux devices to run Android apps when needed, which also can help bridge the gap in usability until mobile Linux distros are competitive with Android.
If you want some anonymity, you can't just have a single phone and expect it can do everything.
You need separated devices, and do the anonymous stuff in the most private one.
It is the same principle as having separate machines for work and personal stuff.
Yes, it is "impractical". That's unavoidable. Let's keep the conversation on what can be done, not some theoretical perfect device no one will ever make.
Long term, but the software isn't quite there, though improving.
Worse the radios don't support everything my carrier does. 5g is a must where I live as 4g is being skipped in remote locations that are finally being upgraded from 2g.
Doesn't look like it, only continental europe & uk. The bands it supports are in use by Sprint and T-mobile though, so if you import it it will probably work on those carriers.
The frontend seems to be 100% shopify dependent (ie. the page is blank if the shopify domain is blocked), but I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing.
So Google is balancing your privacy with their expansion. If something went to court Google could be what keeps you out of court, because unless there is an independent expert, manufacturers tend to become the defacto court expert and most of the time you are probably a tiny little cash cow for them and they like milking you.
It makes a fine daily driver. Main complaint: Location stamps for google camera photos are a bit intermittent unless I give the sandboxed play services network access. Not sure why it's so hard to ping GPS occasionally in the background, and stick the last known location in the exif data.
Still, I would recommend this setup to the HN crowd.
Graphene was one of the two alternatibes, the other being Calyx. Since I'm using my old and tristed Pixel 2, it was Calyx because Graphene didn't support the Pixel 2 anymore. At first I had to adapt to the lack of Google services. Now, I wont go back anymore.
Looking in the settings, I see there is something called TalkBack:
```
When Talkback is on, it provides spoken feedback so that you can use your device without looking at the screen. Talkback is intended for situations or people who have difficulty seeing the screen.
```
I've recently switched to GrapheneOS, and I had issues using my old banks app (DNB, Norwegian bank) but my current bank (Sparebank1, also Norwegian) works perfectly on GrapheneOS.
I've also discovered that some apps that require safetynet, can be grabbed from the Huawei store and used, because apparently on chinese phones your bank suddenly doesn't need safetynet to be secure.
I do without issues, but it varies on your bank's app. There's a good chance you'll need Google Play Services, so you can receive two factor push notifications for example. But thankfully GrapheneOS has the option for Google Play Services to be installed sandboxed to varying degrees.
These aims shouldn't be incompatible. The device should be able to use purely local location data to tag the photos, and then the photos should only be made available to applications the user trusts.
We've been so brainwashed by saas companies to expect that simply collecting information implies sharing it. The point of distributions like this is to remove those cloud dependencies while retaining functionality, and placing that functionality at the control of the user.
Fine if you decide to have GPS enabled for photos, but it should be opt in rather than opt out. Anyone who manages to get access to your images could reconstruct a map of where and when you have been
Google camera prompts about saving location on first startup. Graphene's default camera defaults to "off".
I naively assumed, given how GPS works, that I could enable location access, and disable network access for the camera app, and that it would still be capable of copying two floating point numbers from the local GPS chipset to the exif data.
Instead, it wants to call out to some questionable network services.
I'm clearly not the only one that wants this feature. Graphene even includes a reimplementation of the necessary Google API.
However, it (and the original google implementation) are flaky. This all "just worked" on my iPhone and (before that) Windows Phone. It didn't even occur to me that it was a thing that could be screwed up.
Is this real? It has the appeal of a typical scam/phishing site ... and I am not just talking about the design. Some things like business address appear to be placeholders.
Hi, I understand the doubters. Please note that the business address is the building where we currently work from :). As written on the website "This is not our full time job (may be one day), but we enjoy seeing others realize that they have options when it comes to their phone."; this is why we haven't specified the full address (with room/floor). We are based in Hong Kong but we have also have other people helping us from other parts of Europe and US. Cheers
i was wondering why de-googled.com does not offer e.foundation as well, but then they sell phones as well, and i guess there is no need to compete on the same product.
very happy with /e/OS for more than two years now.
Ditto. Have a fairphone3 with /e/ (bought directly from them) for 2 years also. It has it's quirks and compromises, though most of those are 'features' of not having google. Overall I am happy with it but it takes a bit of work to get most of the features back of a googled phone. Signal backups, shared notes, banking apps, etc. Most banking apps work, though some only with micro-g. I would like to test some other degoogled options to compare/contrast but I would recommend /e/ (which is very close to lineage+microg) to at least technically capable people, not yet ready as a birthday gift for granny though.
If this is your jam, it might be worth to contribute to: https://github.com/hiveminds/productivity-phone it is an opinionated, low-quality repo that automatically swaps the operating system of the Fairphone 2 to de-googled LineageOS (and back again if you want to).
It is tested using sample-size=1, does not yet have good documentation and I'm in the process (low priority) of setting up meaningful testing and CI. However, I think the code, once cleaned up, is relatively portable to other devices (that support LineageOS). Disclaimer, I'm involved in the development of that repo.
This will probably be buried because I'm too late to the party...
This website is probably just selling you the results of following a guide from a guy who goes by Michael Bazzel. He has a podcast (Privacy, Security, and OSINT show) and releases a privacy book every other year, alternating with an OSINT book. He also has good guides on his website and they sell all sorts of training.
Anyway, if you want it done right, do it yourself and know what you're getting. My understanding is that his guides are aimed at an audience significantly less technically capable than HN.
You are completely right, as we write on the website the most secure and private way to degoogle your phone is to do it yourself. The phones we sell we the pre-installed OS are more for people that are not technically able to do it themselves.
See, my frustration is, apps can still track you even with all this and copperheados or whatever. And you still get pwned no matter what. If you have to use android I agree, this is the way to go but all I would be doing is giving myself false assurances of privacy and security if I believed there is a significant difference in effective security or privacy if I just used an iPhone that is better supported,nicer UX and nicer (quality) hardware.
I prefer to treat smartphones as hostile devices and move important data elsewhere to retain control.
Been running CalyxOS on my Pixel 5 for half a year now, and it's been great. I'd advise just doing the installation yourself instead of buying a pre-configured phone, since it's not very hard if you already have a bit of technical know-how.
Also I find it ironic that this website is full of Google requests, we've got YouTube, google translate, gstatic content, google recaptcha, googleapis, and google fonts requests all just on the landing page alone.
Doesn't help that it's sending data to Facebook either.