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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Future of smartphone privacy (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

33 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?

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[–] [email protected] 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.