QuoteProf. Doug Leith at Trinity College Dublin along with Dr. Paul Patras and Haoyu Liu at the University of Edinburgh examined the data sent by six variants of the Android OS developed by Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei, Realme, LineageOS and /e/OS.
Article Summary:
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-10-reveals-scale-data-sharing-android-mobile.html
Report (PDF):
https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/Android_privacy_report.pdf
The only way you're going to have even a whiff of privacy is to put away your phone. And stay off FB.
I wonder if VOIP services are tracking & selling? I have to assume they are.
All of this increasingly invasive tech does make me believe that silo-ing your purchases is the one of the best defenses.
Honestly, I think this is like the plastics problem and the climate problem. The industries that profit want to make it a matter of personal responsibility and we are never going to get there that way. It will require a restructuring.
The only way we'll make progress on climate is through price/cost incentives.
The problem with privacy is that I don't see a way where an internet that respects privacy becomes cheaper than one that doesn't.
Every client site I've ever worked on uses Google Analytics.
Nobody I know will pay $5/month each for ad-free Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, YouTube and whatever else they are using.
The one thing that does give me hope is the podcast ecosystem, which seems to be doing quite well with advertising. It's semi-trackable if you can get people to put in your affiliate URL (usually in exchange for a special offer), but other than that there is no tracking.
But when we start talking about Fitbit and poop-sniffing toilets and your connected heart-rate monitor and yoru Apple watch, I think that becomes a question of what value you give up and laws that force those businesses to offer services without sharing your data.
Obviously that model is possible. Password managers live and die on the promise of keeping your data private and secure. That shows there is a market for paid services that make and keep that promise.
Though my guess is that password manager companies are selling some types of data too, just not (hopefully) your passwords.
/e/OS was the only one that sent so little data, out of the box, it was insignificant. But the trick is what apps you choose to install afterward. I only use Twitter in the browser on my /e/phone and even though it isn't 100% in keeping info from Twitter it's way better than the app.
But I do have some dodgy apps like Wunderground weather. Although I might try bookmarking the NOAA weather site on my browser to see if I can dump Wunderg. I did find a FOSS Reddit app that works pretty good for me.
What surprised me was LineageOS. /e/OS uses a fork of Lineage, but they had to fork it for a reason because Lineage was still leaking some data to G.
/e/OS isn't going to keep spy/government types out, but they did cut off Google and other commercial spies so long as you are careful about what aftermarket apps you install.
I feel like I'm the Invisible Man by today's standards --at least to marketers other than Amz. Even if they do find a way to present a profile-based ad I just don't see it, thanks to my screening tech. I get almost no spam; email, texts, or even robocalls.
That said, I think they can track me by proxy ---my wife's phone & ipad are on 24/7 and bristling with apps.
I'm not on social media, but I am significantly on Amazon and Google (3 Google Workspaces accounts). But I feel there is no escape.
>>bookmarking the NOAA weather site
I realize that this is probably a bit over the top, but wanted to have access to highly customized forecasts based on very precise locations because altitude varies so much where I am. Five miles away is 4000 feet lower and a completely different forecast.
So I scrape the NOAA forecasts and put them on my own website. It's just for personal use. I doubt anyone other than me and a few friends use it. But it's handy. It took an afternoon to get up and running with Drupal (but that's because I didn't know how to scrape and parse NWS data - the actual site setup with default theme and such was only a small part of it).
I rip the NOAA site for my zip code long/lat of my subdivision but I couldn't do that (yet) on a phone.
I just put the NOAA forecast site for my town on Vivaldi Speed Dial on my laptop. Which then sync'd to Vivaldi Android on my phone. Does happy dance.
The NOAA weather page has everything I need, No Ads, and it's fast. It also renders great on the phone screen. I think this is what kept me from using it on mobile in the past - it was desktop only, like ergo said.
Anyway, I'll try it daily for a couple of weeks and if it gets the job done I dump Wunderground*
*Wunderground was pretty good back in the day, but they took a dive when WeatherChannel bought them and then again later when IBM bought WC.
Yes, NOAA has upped their game in mobile. I don't think I would have bothered to scrape them like I do if their current site had existed at the time.
In general, I also find the NOAA forecast to be best for our area. They tend to shoot the middle more.
>> silo-ing your purchases
Please say more about that. I'm not sure what it means or how to do it.
> silo-ing
Limit your vendors to a select few, even if it occasionally means paying more for an item. The object is to keep your credit card OUT of as many shopping carts as possible. If I buy from ebay or a miscellaneous vendor I use Paypal rather than giving them my cc info with the hope that paypal doesn't share that card data.
>> Limit your vendors to a select few
Ah, that makes sense. Thanks.
I tend to do that already, although sometimes a new vendor will tempt me with something irresistible.