How good is /e/ privacy based LineageOS fork?
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Depends on how far you want to go. From what I've been able to tell, they pedel a lot of flashy metrics and still had a bunch of google calls. Some of which you can manually remove, same as LOS. I would avoid buying into their cloud and keeping an eye on things yourself, if you want to install it. I saw them rebrand a bunch of OSS tooling as their own products back then. Don't know if things changed since then, but I don't trust the marketing.
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I recently picked up a pixel 7a on ebay. $200 for like new condition. Probably the current sweet spot for value and remaining years of support.
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I have no banking apps on that phone, sorry.
So I don’t know if they work. -
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I have ING app, it works seamlessly through microG but I don't need it for basic use of the app. I don't use my phone to pay for stuff.
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Haven't had any major apps not work on it. Except one banking app for a while in the beginning, but works now
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I've used it for almost five years, flashed it myself on my FP3. I disabled microG and I'm very careful & strict about what I install on my phone, also their Advanced Privacy set of tools is pretty good. For my threat model is more than enough and I am very happy overall. Never had any serious issues, or even mildly serious ones tbh, despite people yelling about Android security updates arriving late. There was an outage in their cloud services in October that required a complete revamping of their server infrastructure and that took months but I don't use their cloud so I wasn't affected at all.
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I know that GrapheneOS is really easy to install. Problem is that I don't have a Pixel.
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very very bad
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It's dangerous to get too obsessed with trying to secure everything against state actor level threats. It's not that hard to dramatically increase your privacy if you're currently using a regular android phone. Sure, yes, more security is better, but a single individual's private information isn't actually that valuable. It only becomes valuable to exploit people at a massive scale. Even just putting up minor speedbumps to data collection can massively increase your privacy as long as you aren't being individually targeted, and more people getting into caring about their privacy is a good thing. Any de-googled android rom is already a big step in that direction. Lets not let perfect be the enemy of good.
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If OP was trying to secure themselves against interest from conventional state actor like a large intelligence service, I'd say they probably need to throw their phone in a woodchipper and start hitchhiking to the nearest professional spy training program.
More realistic concerns that an ordinary person probably has are casual mass surveillance and local police fuckery. Random AOSP Roms are not sufficient to handle either of those threats.
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They're actually pretty good at protecting you from casual mass surveillance as long as you don't do anything stupid with them, that was the whole point of my post. It's just not profitable to spy on you if they have to bother to put any effort into it.
I also think you're overestimating the capabilities of most local police. When I said state level actors I wasn't just talking about the NSA. Smaller countries, actual US states, or even some big cities would be included there, but your local small town police department wouldn't even know where to start. If you plan on personally pissing off any of those bigger police agencies then you should really just be assuming no phone is safe. Otherwise you're not likely to run into anyone that even knows what de-googled android is, let alone how to get into it.
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Our local PD literally have access to stingrays, cellbrite/Pegasus (I don't actually know which one they pay for) and military weaponry. In the suburbs, they have armored vehicles as well (tanks and APCs, not armored swat trucks).
Obviously it varies by where you live because different departments will have different levels of funding and will ask for different toys from the feds, but you'd be surprised how comically over equipped many PDs are.
