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.

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

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How can you make stock Android as private as possible? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

21 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I know that stock Android itself is spyware.

What tips about setting up my stock Android phone would you give me? It's not factory unlocked so I'm sticking with Google Android.

Things I've done:

Stopped and disabled all apps that I don't use or need.
Replaced all apps that I can with FOSS alternatives from github using Obtainium.
Not installed things that I can just check on my laptop like email.

Is there anything else that I can do? Thanks in advance

Edit I've also:

Changed my DNS to Mullvad DNS
Restricted app permissions to only what they need
Not signed into the phone. I don't even have Gmail account.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

So one of the gotchas about stopped/disabled apps is that other apps can still call and launch them. I frequently saw my apps pop back up even after being disabled, since I used SuperFreezZ to monitor them. https://f-droid.org/packages/superfreeze.tool.android/

The alternative to that would be an ADB disable. IIRC it takes the app away from userspace completely. It doesn't touch the system-level though, so a factory reset will bring it back.

If you can't handle setting up ADB and it's hoops, there is an app combo that can set up a bridge and run the ADB disable for you: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.github.samolego.canta/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 hours ago

This looks cool, but the dev seems pretty unavailable for updates for the past few years. Does the app still seem pretty solid in spite of that?