Privacy

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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.

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Is Google Pixel actually good for privacy? (lemmy.basedcount.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by witchdoctor@lemmy.basedcount.com to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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I hear many people say that the Google Pixel is good for privacy, but is it?

I'm asking this because I find it weird, of all the companies, Google having the most “privacy”.

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[–] robotdna@toast.ooo 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's quite a statement, are you sure about that? The Graphene team has done a considerable amount of work sandboxing the environment of Google Play, both in memory, permission structure, and IO access that MicroG completely blows past. Given how the Graphene sandboxing works, I actually can't think of a scenario where the statement that MicroG is more private than Graphene sandboxed Google Play. In either scenario you don't have to log in, so I'd much rather have an environment that has been isolated than tooling that still has tendrils reaching into the main OS itself (MicroG).

[–] mctoasterson@reddthat.com 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah one important key is not logging in. If you use Aurora store to install apps, and don't log into any Google apps, Google can't be certain of your identity enough to tie it to your previous Google account. I guess they could probabilistically match you based on stuff like your location in Maps app vs. a previous normie device known to be "you".

One thing I'd like to test is the implications if you log into Gmail on the hardened Vanadium browser and then log out. I would think it would still be pretty safe on Graphene because Google would have no access to other apps activities on the device and even location requests don't get routed to Googles geolocation service unless the user specifically turns that back on.