Privacy

31431 readers

945 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

[Matrix/Element]Dead
Discord

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 4 years ago

MODERATORS

Less-worst android brands? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by gomp@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

22 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Since I need to run a few apps that won't work on LineageOS (because dumb developer security stance), I need to buy a "regular" android device that includes all the google "services".

Ideally, it should be a cheap second-hand phone that will still receive security updates for a long time.

Are there bands that are better (well, "less worse") than others from a privacy perspective?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] bbbhltz@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago

Are there better brands?

Probably. I'll echo the thoughts and opinions of others, sorry for the repeat.

Pixel phones will continue to receive updates (and GrapheneOS supports Pixels as long as Google supports them). If you go full tinfoil hat, you'll see that there are people out there accusing Google of being an NSA partner and more.

Fairphone is a neat idea for reparability reasons. They also try to support their devices for a long time. But, they can be expensive for less than premium hardware.

Try to find devices that ship with very little bloatware:

Nokia makes some cheap phones that might be tempting, but HMD Global (licence-holder for Nokia) has messed stuff up in the past. My Nokia 5.3, for example, received a bad update. What was bad? Well, if you tried to factory reset it bricked the phone. I did not read the forum before resetting my phone (https://community.phones.nokia.com/discussion/66312/warning-do-not-factory-reset-nokia-5-3-bricked-phone) so that cheap little guy didn't even make it to year 2. Probably for the best as they were once accused of sharing data with [2 very large countries].
Motorola, like Nokia, makes some cheaper devices. And, like Nokia, tends to ship with little to no bloatware. But, they are notorious for abandoning devices.
Sony and Asus does not fall under the cheap category, unless you buy used.

If you really want to save, buy a broken phone and fix it. Rounded.com sells spare parts for different phones, so you could even find a phone for cheap and make it last using spare parts.