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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I'm looking to get a custom ROM that has good compatibility with my device. Would you recommend /e/? I couldn't find a tutorial on how to install it with Linux but I don't think it should be that hard to figure out.
What phone do you want to flash on? Is it in this list? https://doc.e.foundation/devices
I've used it for almost five years, flashed it myself on my FP3. I disabled microG and I'm very careful & strict about what I install on my phone, also their Advanced Privacy set of tools is pretty good. For my threat model is more than enough and I am very happy overall. Never had any serious issues, or even mildly serious ones tbh, despite people yelling about Android security updates arriving late. There was an outage in their cloud services in October that required a complete revamping of their server infrastructure and that took months but I don't use their cloud so I wasn't affected at all.
Depends on how far you want to go. From what I've been able to tell, they pedel a lot of flashy metrics and still had a bunch of google calls. Some of which you can manually remove, same as LOS. I would avoid buying into their cloud and keeping an eye on things yourself, if you want to install it. I saw them rebrand a bunch of OSS tooling as their own products back then. Don't know if things changed since then, but I don't trust the marketing.
/e/os is often behind on Android monthly security patches (sometimes up to a month or more!) and the apps they fork I have heard also often lag behind upstream. It also doesnt do much to deblob the ROM if proprietary binary blobs.
Comparison table of Android ROMs: https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm
Their easy installer is why many people I know installed it, but it only supports 21 devices and mine wasn't one of them, so I can't say much about usability or security. If yours is one of them, there's also a Linux guide on their website: https://doc.e.foundation/easy-installer
Yeah. I love the idea of the easy installer. Mine isn't listed either.
I love the idea of the easy installer.
looks at GrapheneOS installer.... Literally just 3 buttons on a Website you have to click, all of the steps easily written with clear instructions for Linux as well as windows
looks at /e/ installer
I give up. If you call that bloated peace of dierrhea an „Easy installer”, you could just as well say that gentoo is easier to install than mint.
I know that GrapheneOS is really easy to install. Problem is that I don't have a Pixel.
My Problem is not that you dont have a Pixel, but that /e/ 's Website is literal dogpoop, and that already tells a lot about their OS. Like, they are in a literal conflict to support other, maybe even more privacy friendly backup for cloud systems because the already have their own
Does your phone support anything else? LOS, Calyx, etc
Here is a good comparison. As a reminder, there is no privacy without security, so if you live in the US (or anywhere that illegal searches happen regularly), I'd argue a less secure solution is by definition a less private solution.
It's dangerous to get too obsessed with trying to secure everything against state actor level threats. It's not that hard to dramatically increase your privacy if you're currently using a regular android phone. Sure, yes, more security is better, but a single individual's private information isn't actually that valuable. It only becomes valuable to exploit people at a massive scale. Even just putting up minor speedbumps to data collection can massively increase your privacy as long as you aren't being individually targeted, and more people getting into caring about their privacy is a good thing. Any de-googled android rom is already a big step in that direction. Lets not let perfect be the enemy of good.
If OP was trying to secure themselves against interest from conventional state actor like a large intelligence service, I'd say they probably need to throw their phone in a woodchipper and start hitchhiking to the nearest professional spy training program.
More realistic concerns that an ordinary person probably has are casual mass surveillance and local police fuckery. Random AOSP Roms are not sufficient to handle either of those threats.
They're actually pretty good at protecting you from casual mass surveillance as long as you don't do anything stupid with them, that was the whole point of my post. It's just not profitable to spy on you if they have to bother to put any effort into it.
I also think you're overestimating the capabilities of most local police. When I said state level actors I wasn't just talking about the NSA. Smaller countries, actual US states, or even some big cities would be included there, but your local small town police department wouldn't even know where to start. If you plan on personally pissing off any of those bigger police agencies then you should really just be assuming no phone is safe. Otherwise you're not likely to run into anyone that even knows what de-googled android is, let alone how to get into it.
Our local PD literally have access to stingrays, cellbrite/Pegasus (I don't actually know which one they pay for) and military weaponry. In the suburbs, they have armored vehicles as well (tanks and APCs, not armored swat trucks).
Obviously it varies by where you live because different departments will have different levels of funding and will ask for different toys from the feds, but you'd be surprised how comically over equipped many PDs are.
Well, it's certainly true that it varies by where you are, but I'm pretty sure Graphene isn't going to protect you from an APC any better than /e/OS, and the county sheriff where I live wouldn't know a stingray from an Xbox, but maybe I just live too far out into the middle of nowhere to be typical.
From the looks of it GrapheneOS still seems like the best choice by far..
if you got pixel and don't like GOS team, Calyx OS is a decent alternative also, you can lock bootloader and get most apps to work with microg
Basically, but not everyone has a pixel or can afford to buy a new device.
I recently picked up a pixel 7a on ebay. $200 for like new condition. Probably the current sweet spot for value and remaining years of support.
Personally I hear it had been a mixed bag. Hopefully time has refined this... Old stories about digging up old LOS images, bare minimal patches, and release under e branding with no consideration for security/hardening. Buuut that was info from a grapheneos vs eos forum, or something. Do your research, you know what sub you're in.
A couple of my coworkers use it they are pretty happy with it and it works good from what I’ve heard :)
It’s pretty solid. I use it daily and don’t have any big problems. Install is simple. Just install adb and fastboot from your linux repository. This should cover the most of the installation requirements.
Sounds pretty straight forward. What is compatibility like? Have you tried any banking apps?
Haven't had any major apps not work on it. Except one banking app for a while in the beginning, but works now
I have ING app, it works seamlessly through microG but I don't need it for basic use of the app. I don't use my phone to pay for stuff.
I have no banking apps on that phone, sorry. So I don’t know if they work.
I don't know if installing from the repositories is such a fantastic idea. I've had instances where I've almost fucked up a device because I installed the ones from the repositories and they weren't new enough. I would recommend downloading the ones from Google directly.
Edit: the cli platform-tools
Sounds like either a terrible bug or user error. Which in both cases should be fixed.
Well, when I tried the one directly from the repository, my version of Android would not boot, but then I downloaded the one directly from Google and did the same commands. And it booted. So yeah, either it was a bug or something.