So which on of these are better for my pixel 7a if we consider these:

i dont care about leaving the bootloader unlocked

i want customization to my os as long as this is possible

i hate google so i dont want any google things or google spyware (i dont use any google service)

i need push notifications for some apps (maybe microg or sandboxed google play services? idk)

i don't use esim or google pay so idc about these

i need A LOT of privacy and security to my data to the point that i want to block trackers for any app i use

i wanna use google camera as it is in stock rom but i dont want google spy shit. if i use a firewall would that be ok?

Note: i can sacrifice locking the bootloader and customization for my privacy/security/not having spyware on my phone

Thanks in advance!

Edit: i just saw that there is iodé (which sees app trackers and i found it interesting) plus CopperheadOS

Edit 2: THANK YOU ALL A LOT, your answers are the best, imma go with grapheneos and donate them also cause their job is the best

also i found this matrix for oses that helped me: https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm !!!

Edit 3: Deleted CopperheadOS from the title - no need to compare cause it's garbage (see comments)

For a while now I have been looking for email providers that are transparent and meet EFF standards, and in fact, I went to the EFF website to see if there was an article about email providers, but found nothing, the only decent providers I could find on my own, have been tutanota and cock.li, I am currently using tutanota and was planning to move everything to cock. li, but unfortunately it hasn't been going through its best moment, I would stay with tutanota if it wasn't for one thing, and that is that it can't be used inside thunderbird, there is a plugin that allows you to open a window with tutanota, but that's not the idea, ideally you would be able to add your email address without any external plugin, and that is why I am asking for recommendations that meet the standards mentioned above, but that is also compatible with thunderbird to be able to save the emails locally, any client can download the emails to be able to have them locally, but that is the one I use personally.

I've searched the internet a bit, but couldn't find what I was looking for.

I saw Leon, but it doesn't have an android client, for example.

Is there good assistances, that you can self host and use on your phone? and that can perform actions like make a phone call, play music, send WhatsApp etc?

I'm not a big user of these, but recently I used Google Assistant and found it was very convenient in my case. So ofc I wanted the benefit without all the spying.

Would ideally look for something that I can self host on my VPS (oracle cloud) and run a client on Android.

thanks!

Abstract of the paper: Despite the dramatic rise of surveillance in our societies, only limited research has examined its effects on humans. While most research has focused on voluntary behaviour, no study has examined the effects of surveillance on more fundamental and automatic aspects of human perceptual awareness and cognition. Here, we show that being watched on CCTV markedly impacts a hardwired and involuntary function of human sensory perception—the ability to consciously detect faces. Using the method of continuous flash suppression (CFS), we show that when people are surveilled (N = 24), they are quicker than controls (N = 30) to detect faces. An independent control experiment (N = 42) ruled out an explanation based on demand characteristics and social desirability biases. These findings show that being watched impacts not only consciously controlled behaviours but also unconscious, involuntary visual processing. Our results have implications concerning the impacts of surveillance on basic human cognition as well as public mental health.

My own commentary: to the privacy concerns about CCTVs we can now add also concerns about mental health of people under CCTVs.

Although I hate the Brave browser, the search engine is the most useful of the others. It gives me the most correct results compared to the others, even it sometimes ignores the quality resources.

I wonder your opinion about the search engine. Do you have any negative ones?

Recently I came across Microsoft Pluton while searching for a new laptop. Initially I thought it was like TPM and wouldn't affect Linux. But the more I researched, the worse it got. According to them

Microsoft Pluton is a chip-to-cloud security technology that provides hardware-based root of trust, secure identity, secure attestation, and cryptographic services

Does it connect to Cloud irrespective of the OS I ran? If yes this could be a privacy nightmare.

Why aren't more people talking about this? It been here at-least since the last two generation of CPUs from AMD (from my research worst offender) and Intel.

Isn't this a privacy violation lawsuit waiting to happen? In what ways does this Microsoft Pluton chip affect people who use Linux and should I not buy a new Laptop?

Also what about manufactures like Framework? Are they also forced to work with this chips?

From where I am, used laptops are not worth it.

Cricut’s Design Space enforces automatic cloud syncing of user files, even those stored "locally." This raises serious GDPR concerns, especially when files contain personal data like client details, addresses, or sensitive info, undermining user control and privacy.

What steps can we take to push Cricut toward GDPR compliance and respectful data handling? Would regulatory complaints or organized campaigns for local-only storage options make a difference?

Looking forward to your thoughts and strategies!

At home I am using PiHole but "on the road" I also what a good solution like PiHole. So a few days ago I read that NextDNS is a good option and in some cases even better then PiHole. So that is, why I'm now here to get some opiniond from you gals and guys :)

I have an android phone that had some unnecessary apps which i wanted to remove . Today i was reading up on how to remove it and came across shizuku and canta which seemed easy enough so i borrowed my friends phone to use his hotspot (you have to use wireless debugging for shizuku to work and it needs to connect to a hotspot) and connected it and removed my apps . As i was at his place and reading up on all the apps to remove and etc i was connected to his phone for a good 2-3 hours while having usb debugging and wireless debugging and shizuku on .

And now it just hit me that i may have done more damage by doing that than letting the bloat be cause the guy is infamous for having all kinda malware apps and games on his phones and computers and i have seen and jocked about it today too :(. So my question is how much did i mess up ? could his malicious phone and apps have installed or messed up my device while connected ? how much access did that phone have over my device ? The thing is none of the shizuku guides or reddit posts had any warnings about needing to connect to a secure network and me being the idiot i am didn't think of that .How to check if i messed up and whay should i do ? Also for the next time would a random router be secure to do this on this ? or is a personnel computer/phone necessary ?

UPDATE : Have scanned it with hypatia and extended list and no positives have come up . The smart play would prolly be to wipe the phone but i have too much things on it and have customized it to my liking a lot throughout the years to do it on suspicion . Should i ? a lot of lemmings are saying its a niche attack vendor but i have not yet seen anyone explaining if it was possible and how ? or what all should i do better next time . Do feel free to chip in .

Basically create an alias for every combination to prevent privacy cross contamination.

For instance, not only should you make an email alias for an Eventbrite account, but for every organization you sign up for events with. You are required to enter an email (any email) for the event, which can be seen by both Eventbrite and the organization. If you enter in the email of your Eventbrite account then the org could give that away, resulting in email spam and you can't be sure if it was either Eventbrite itself or the org that sold you out. If that happens then you would probably want to delete email address but then you have to change it in other places you need to send/receive emails from.

Another example is Discourse forum sites. While Discourse is open source and self-hostable, you may not always be sure if a Discourse site is self-hosted or using paid hosting. A lot online places have both their own website and a separate discourse site. Bitwarden's forum site doesn't have a sign-in option using your Bitwarden.com account, and Raindrop.io uses canny.io to track app feedback which has also uses its own login. (I'm actually glad I made an alias for every single Discourse forum site before realizing all of this).

Shows all the information Google gets from just one photograph, using Ai.

On Librewolf i got 16.48 bits of information, on TOR browser 10.32 bits, but on Tails I managed to get only 9.3 bits.

https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

Hello I use GOS have for almost a year and finally removed sandboxed play services in my main profile and only use Aurora for my bank app and Apple Music in my main profile still have Google Voice in private space but seperated from my main profile all my apps are only FOSS other than the 2 apps from aurora and it feels so good to finally say that. I just wanted to share my big news with you and hope you can all ditch Google apps/services as I have its amazing how my spam calls/texts have stopped or become less the more I degoogled.

I hope everyone has a great Degoogle/privacy enchancing experience

Any better replacements for Google Voice welcome in the comments if there is any.

There are lot of people in the privacy communities who are shaming and attacking those of us who want take take privacy seriously. more than just using firefox and a vpn. So many people are trying to influence the privacy community to not use whonix or tor browser. That it's paranoid and extreme to leave your phone at home. And so on.

They keep pushing this propaganda without even knowing what they are talking about. They will keep spamming everywhere that you don't need to protect your firmware from physical access adversaries because the only adversaries who can do something like that are feds and feds will never target you unless you are a cartel leader or running a darknet market or something very terrible.

But these same people who spread this propaganda can't even tell you what the difference is between bios and uefi. Which means they have no idea what they are talking about and are just spreading propaganda/disinformation.

Why would they do that? They are probably american feds. We all know there is lots of evidence of feds like fbi,nsa,cia corruption and they all hate privacy and keep spamming their propaganda about if you have nothing to hide then you don't need privacy. With that in mind it's obvious that they are doing at least some sort of propaganda/influence campaigns to slow down, derail, end privacy activism.

We also know it doesn't take much to become a terrorist. UK gov has officially publicly announced that anyone on X who retweets an ongoing protest is a terrorist and they will be arrested. Elon musk is officially a terrorist and the uk gov has repeatedly asked usa to hand him over. So it's very easy to become targeted by feds, you dont have to do anything bad, just use freedom of speech.

And in france it was many times in the news about a group of friends who were arrested for using Signal. A girl they tried to convince to start using signal called the police and said they are using anonymous communication called Signal and then they were arrested and all their computers taken and forensics went through all the data on their computer and judge said its criminal evidence they have ad blockers on their browser.

It's an infinite list of evidence about how tyrannical the feds are and it doesn't take anything to become targeted by them, just bad luck.

Imagine if you are traveling and go to a hostel and tell the people you're staying there together with that your computer is off limits, no touching it and you will know because you have lots of security to detect tampering. If they start gossiping about this and then call the police you will probably have your computer confiscated and then forensics will go through it. Or maybe they'll send an undercover hacker to try some covert physical access attacks.

And this is just talking about feds being adversary. There are also criminals that are hackers. And feds can be criminals too, like the high ranking cia officer who recently traveled south america and drugged and raped dozens of women before he was finally caught.

This all leads to my suggestion. I think we need to stop the feds influence and propaganda campaigns against the privacy communities. Stop shaming and attacking people for wanting more privacy than you. We need to start banning these people. Are there any privacy communities remaining where you can say you're using tor browser without getting attacked for being an "extremist" and paranoid just because you use tor browser or leaving phone at home?

I'm happy there are so many that agree with me. Remember to not get stuck in the details but it's about the bigger picture I'm saying here. To the few who are questioning the little stories I said and asking for sources: I didn't think it was necessary, i honestly believed most here would have heard of it. Of course you won't find an "official" source because of all the corrupt censorship the governments are doing. That france story was a hot topic in all the privacy and tech communities when it was happening. I found discussions everywhere about it. If you can't find any good sources for these stories then I maybe will have trouble finding it too, maybe it is gone because of censorship. And even if I do find it, then it will just give the feds more meta data about me because they are probably angry at me for making this post and want to find me and punish me for making this post. I bet half the downvotes are from feds.

I want firefox on my laptop to only go through a VPN and the easiest solution I came up with is forcing firefox SOCKS5 Proxy Docker Container which goes through a Mullvad gluetun docker container. I connect to my home server via tailscale

Browser < -tailscale- > SOCKS5 Docker <

gluetun Docker <

Internet

Is that a good idea? It seems a little overengineered, but simpler than running two VPNs on one machine?

Thanks

I just did this on a website that said my Simplelogin alias isn't allowed for signup, but changed it successfully after the fact from a disposable email.

(I'm aware that many Lemmy users hate Reddit. this discussion would be useful for anyone that Lemmy users that also use Reddit)

This came as a big surprise to many users on places like r/help and r/bugs, including me. Reddit made this post last week on it: Say goodbye to new.reddit on Dec 11, 2024 : r/modnews.

Seeing this r/privacy post: sh.reddit (shreddit) is a Google spyware machine designed to de-anonymize you : r/privacy, New New reddit (2023 Reddit redesign) pings Google repatcha on every single page load. I saw the comments but its not clear how to counter this other than using old.reddit.com (which I like even less than 2023 reddit) or using 3rd party apps.