I knew Tom was a bias shill when he started questioning me when I first started questioning. And only cause his post made absolutely no sense, like it does now.
Until a few things happen I can no longer put the banner up.
They need an online sales avenue, evil maid protection, and at least the amount of transparency they had when I started directing to the site and hopefully more (full blown open source would be best). I will leave this thread up for all the flaming I deserve.
I still recommend if you must have a shart phone to use GrapheneOS on a Pixel device. If you can’t do it yourself MLABs is still a viable option. I will continue to use the phone they gave me. If you mention Future4200 you will get $100 off/phone and probably more with a bulk purchase.
To be fair 2k is chump change and a small portion of a large companies cell phone bill. that service you are referring to is not for you / a small company. It is aimed at like 100+ employees.
Pretty much every smart phone you have / can get is loaded with spyware. That usually comes in the form of preinstalled apps that send your location, call history, contacts, text messages, pictures, etc, etc, to who knows what country and company. This also carries security implications because those preinstalled apps are often insecure and are constantly making outside internet connections.
GrapheneOS is a fork of android without those preinstalled apps. You can install it on a Google Pixel phone. It is setup in a way that if one part of your phone is compromised it supposedly wont effect the other. If your facebook app gets hacked, your banking app in the other profile would be secure. If your sms app is vulnerable, you wont leak all your signal messages and emails too.
Google stuffs is on a completely different profile that can’t touch your other apps. If you use Tor and Briar, supposedly your messages will be routed through a secure network that the local It guy / Telecom will not be able to track, and will make it more difficult for gmen to associate with you. Everything you say is recorded when you have ‘Okay Google’ turned on, so stuff like that isn’t enabled.
There is a huge argument about google/apple/samsung tracking people, and trust me, they ARE doing a lot with your info. It is more valuable than you might think. There is a folder with your name on it and it knows where you were 3 years ago this second, what you ate that day, and your conversation from that afternoon transcribed. They know what you did in your bedroom last night. That is really personal, and if that doesn’t bother you I hope you would understand why it might bother someone else.
I touched on the fact a lot of apps that come baked in, especially ones that dont update and you cant uninstall, are often vulnerable. A lot of phones don’t even get security updates or they only roll in twice a year or so despite huge vulnerabilities. A lot of people have malware on their phone from a malicious stranger and wouldn’t even know it. This is an attempt to thwart that. Some people think the roms baked by Verizon are malware. Depends on your threat model. A smart phone and computers in general are pretty insecure. Who knows what kind of hardware backdoors google has that will get CVEd in 10 years as a firmware bug that leaks all your data anyways.
This is for people who read and refuse to click the I accept button on those huge privacy invading TOS.