I am a long term GrapheneOS user and would like to talk about it. r/privacy on the redditland blocks custom OS discussions which I think is very bad for user privacy, and I hope this post will be useful to anyone who are in the hunt for better privacy.

Nowadays smartphones are a much bigger threats to our privacy and Desktop systems, and unfortunately manufacturers has designed them to be locked down devices with no user freedom. You can’t just “install Linux” on most smartphones and it is horrible. And most preloaded systems spy on us like crazy. That was why I specifically bought a pixel and loaded GOS onto it.

According to https://grapheneos.org/features , they start from base AOSP’s latest version, imptoves upon it’s security and significantly hardens it. There’s hardened_malloc to.prevent against exploitation, disabling lots of debugging features, disabling USB-c data, hardening the Linux kernel and system apps etc. They even block accessing the hardware identifiers of the phone so that apps cannot detect whqt phone you’re using. That means with Tor and zero permissions given, apps are anonymous.

Compatibility with apps are best in Custom ROMs but there are still that can’t work, especially if they enforce device integrity. Very few apps usually enforce that tho. Also their community isn’t the friendliest but you can get help. Just don’t try and engage too much or have too many debates.

Anyone else here use GrapheneOS, or any other privacy ROMs? What is your experience? Do you disagree on any point? Let’s have a discussion!

  • EngineerGaming@feddit.nl
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    29 days ago

    Here they aren’t officially available yet there are still plenty of resellers - I guess you can find some in your area. I was really scared that the bootloader wouldn’t unlock due to the origin country’s carrier shenanigans, but it went through just fine (still checked every bit of info I could before buying).

    • Cris16228@lemmy.today
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      29 days ago

      Last time I bought a phone it was sold as phone of my country then realized when started that was from another country in Europe so I’m scared of getting that again

      • EngineerGaming@feddit.nl
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        edit-2
        29 days ago

        At least the listings I have seen explicitly listed the origin country. Mine is Japanese, and it cost less than an American counterpart, for example.

        • Cris16228@lemmy.today
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          29 days ago

          It’s not a big deal but the thing I wanted to use was not available on that region🥲 then I learned how shitty the company was