Privacy

31253 readers

891 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

Future of smartphone privacy (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 1 year ago by novarime@sopuli.xyz to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

31 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Ironically, a large number of privacy minded individuals are using Google Pixels flashed with custom roms (Calyx, Graphene, Lineage, etc)

If not designed specifically for privacy, these Android forks are at the very least not stock Android, and stripped of many anti-privacy features.

This can be accomplished due to the Pixel's (mostly) unique attribute - a bootloader that can be unlocked and relocked.

I don't know why Google have allowed their bootloaders this freedom, but I can't imagine that a company with a reputation for killing anything they touch would allow it to continue for much longer.

If/when the day comes that the Pixel is fully locked down, what options are there for privacy enthusiasts to continue using a smartphone, an inherently unprivate device?

Does anyone know of development going into looking at how to unlock bootloaders on any device, opening the door for custom rom flashing to continue?

Are the pinephones, fairphones, etc going to have to ramp up production?

Anything going on in the iphone department allowing for detachment from the Apple ecosystem?

What happens next, really?

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

[–] PeterPoopshit@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

people will just find a new brand that doesn't fuck up the bootloader

Yep, and right now, the Google pixels are the ones that have an unlockable bootloader and have the most features. Some of the pixels have microphone jacks, making them the only phone I know of that can be used in North America that has both a microphone jack and unlockable bootloader.

We used to be able to use the Exynos Samsungs. It was great. Unlockable bootloader, microphone jack and sdcard. Carriers then fucked us by changing the frequencies so the European Samsungs don't work anymore. Now you can't get a phone that has an unlockable bootloader, an sdcard and a microphone jack and also have it work on North America. Shit sucks.