coffeeClean

Probably. But if you want that anti-theft feature, I wonder if you could disable it and then install another app for that which serves you alone. Whatever you install probably wouldn’t be baked into the kernel but probably a good trade-off.

As for PayPal, well, your cc / bank also shares lots of data.

Paypal is not a bank. Paypal is an additional MitM. Using Paypal adds another surveillance capitalist to the chain along with your bank and credit network. But indeed, the banks and credit cards are shit so I am fighting the war on cash quite hard. I’ve already been dragged into court for insisting on paying a creditor in cash. I won that case and will continue insisting on cash payments.

If your threat modelling is that severe

My threat model simply includes mass surveillance. Which is in the threat model of everyone who understands and embraces privacy. It’s worth noting that it’s not purely and infosec stance. I also object to feeding a supplier who is acting against me. The moment I detect that a supplier is working against me, I walk on ethical grounds. They have failed to earn my business. The snooping just happens to be the manner in which they are working against me.

your best bet is Tor Craigslist,

I was doing that at one time but something pushed me off. I don’t recall what.. whether it was SMS verify or CAPTCHAs or phone numbers or fussy email address verifiers... something drove me off.

Ethical consumers patronize the lesser of evils, and go without if it’s feasible given only quite shitty options. Affluenza-driven OCD consumption is the unhealthy obsession that ethical consumers manage to avoid.

I think someone mentioned this is in the Playstore services stuff that’s hardwired in to the platform. Which means if a device is unrooted you can possibly do: $ adb shell 'pm disable --user 13 com.google.android.gms'.

To be clear I linked to someone else’s post. I don’t have the Pixel phone.

If I were to simultaneously demand:

• a phone with a relatively non-evil brand (thus obscure), and
• a rootable phone (thus a mainstream one)

that leaves me with no phone at all. Because only popular mainstream models get rooted and they’re all made by the worst companies.

When my current phone loses its usefulness I might even go without. Or possibly get one 2nd hand although the 2nd hand market still supports the 1st hand market.

I must say Paypal shares customer data with over 600 corporations among other scummy things, so I boycott them. I also boycott eBay because the javascript required to use their website port sniffs your LAN and feeds that back to them, apart from other evils.

But most importantly, I’m not necessarily worried that I would personally get burnt by this. But just like my unwillingness to buy an Intel CPU with a management engine (or AMD’s flavor of this), I am unwilling to buy a product that was designed to work against me. I do not want to finance anti-consumer suppliers. ATM I don’t know how to check whether my version of AOS has this “feature”.

(BTW, I’m not the OP; I just linked their post here)

Someone in the original thread said this swindle does not apply to the US. Though I’m a bit surprised.. it’s the first place where I would expect this to happen.

Startpage is certainly more favorable than Google. But it’s worth mentioning that Startpage is a Google syndicate so Google still profits from the use of Startpage. There are a number of searx instances out there that provide Google results by scraping Google instead of paying for API access. That’s a way to get Google results without feeding Google.

I mean, you can have a custom rom on your phone etc.

The OS is not the issue. It’s that apps are exclusively distributed in the Playstore which requires a Google account to reach. People running homebrew stuff tend to use Aurora, but that app still needs Google creds to use Google’s API. The anonymous option supported by Aurora violates Google’s ToS, so it’s not a legal option that anyone could point to as an official escape from the walled garden.

I personally will not use Aurora, even anonymously, because use of the app in most cases signals to the server that they were successful in getting the app to someone and connecting. It rewards them nonetheless.

That sounds like a good option for regular users and locals. Can that card be bought anonymous non-residents using cash? It would seem to eliminate a lot cases of non-phone users getting screwed but I guess there would still be tourist cases where the 50€ is unjustified. Like if someone is just passing through and needs to change airports (though I guess those are also not the cases where someone would be forced to use a phone app).

To me it is a bit confusing what you are looking for exactly.

It’s research for this article → https://thefreeworld.noblogs.org/post/2024/03/20/comparison-of-the-human-disempowerment-severity-of-3-walled-gardens-facebook-google-and-cloudflare/

and do not have any Google account (or any GAMAM account)

That stumped me for a second. I guess #GAFAM is now being called #GAMAM? I hate to accept the renaming as “Meta” hijacked a normal word to inject their brand into normal conversation unrelated to them. But OTOH, it’s more accurate, sadly enough, since Meta owns the Facebook subsidiary.

I don’t get the 911/112 example. But maybe it’s because I’m generally confused about what you are trying to find out exactly.

Contacting emergency services is an important human right on many levels:

• right to live
• right to healthcare
• right to equal access to public services

So forcing people to patronize Google in order to install the app means people are trapped in Google’s walled garden in order to maintain their human rights. Some say “you can simply dial 112/911, no app needed”. But the app is useful in more situations as it transmits name and address instantly and supports text when you cannot speak.

Here’s a quite interesting story where someone is being denied medical service for not patronizing Google or Apple:

https://mastodon.social/@lrvick/112079059323905912