USA is waging an economic war and you are a casualty. It’s sadly working as intended :( It would be great if this spurred some developement of replacaments inside Iran.

I agree that collective approach would yield more results, but where is this collective to demand such changes? Honestly most people don’t care about their privacy and freedoms all that much. The outrage of Snowden stuff was forgotten in a few weeks and even the excellent GDPR protections didn’t really shift perceptions of the wider public all that much. People would care if the media bombarded them with “libre crisis” for a decade but that isn’t really going to happen because FOSS is dangerous to the most valuable companies of the most powerful country on earth.

What I think realistically can be done is pressuring EU with this issue or individual governments and demand change for the better.

has anyone used session?

Does this mean that MS has to sign Ubuntu update?

i think for verification each full node should be taking measurements as well. But would this approach even allow for consensus? All the miners would observe the same event at the roughly same time so how would you even reach consensus for who gets the reward? Maybe this wouldn’t work after all :(

I agree with you fully on that front. I just think we should demand more than just some settings options.

yeah I’ve seen this research, and again I’m in no way defending Apple’s user abuse. You say that Apple spies much more identifiers which is true as per paper but is true only while using device without touching Play services. It’s measuring spying activity only in idle/startup mode of operation. I kinda doubt Google doesn’t use WiFi MAC address of phone for social/location mining. Paper doesn’t mention anything about what kind of spying happens when you start using your phone as a typical user would: mail, web, maps, YT.

I saw that. I think its unreasonable to argue in favor of Google despite Apple being disastrous. The only privacy conscious option I see for smartphone usage is LineageOS without Gapps + FDroid or /e/ for less tech savvy people. Lots of tracking happens trough WiFi/BT mapping and that means you have to get rid of problematic pieces of SW stack at a pretty low level: Gapps and ditching iPhone completley.

Do you know that spying happens exactly trough Google services? You cannot have any expectation of privacy with Google services installed. Google has monopolized spying on Android by restricting APIs that can be used to spy on users (wifi/bt scans, filesystem, background processing).

I believe you should be measuring some global events so that results can be independently verified across the globe. Maybe measurement of some cosmic radiation? That would then be proof of time. If there is some radiation source that is periodic and globally observable it could work?

Google’s Android is at least open-source and there are some vendors that try to optimize it for better privacy.

That is misleading. There are no large vendors that offer such devices. Only option AFAIK is /e/ foundation with its 3rd party installs, but they are by no means an established player.

how is it any better than iPhone if it comes with all Google spyware? Spying in Android is done with proprietary Google services apps which Fairphone has installed. IIRC Google forces manufacturers to offer either Google-laden devices or use something else. They have contractual obligation to not offer both options like Google stuff vs. LineageOS w/o Google stuff. That contract was also part of antimonopoly case against Google in EU but I’m nut sure how it turned out in the end

heh all that talk about word blacklist and this gets trough. Automatic censorship is truly a stupid idea.

There are certainly options to buy more privacy respecting phones even for non-tech savvy people. Take for example the Fairphone. Its Android is pretty much stripped of the worst stuff and overall (while not perfect) probably better than an Apple phone

That is not really correct because it comes with all the normal spyware included. Fairphone is about being green not privacy conscious. You could flash some custom ROM on it but then we are again in the tech savy area. But it is true that you can buy Fairphone (among other phones) from /e/ foundation.

nice post. I think that the root of the problem is if the FSF should fight only for software freedom or should they also fight on all other fronts. I believe there is great danger that their message wil get diluted to OSI-stuff if they will go down that path. That is probably the main motivation behind all the corporate power that is pushing against RMS. I strongly prefer neutral and freedom respecting GNU system than corporate sponsored social issues aware Android spying machine. Both are open source but only one is in practice free software.