[upupandup]

> rooted deGoogled phone with location defaulted to off and all apps

asking for a friend, she wants to know how to do this, she is very privacy conscious.

> I nearly forgot to mention the phone's VPN-type firewall.

also she wonders what vpn service you use here

> logcat log-displaying program on a rooted smartphone without additional privacy protection steps being taken is astounded

and one last thing she wants to know is how would you do this for a windows 10 laptop? can you hook it up to some raspberry pi device that can monitor outgoing and incoming packets? I suspect its rooted but people keep telling her how its impossible to trojan windows 10.

> one's privacy has considerably lessened in recent decades,

just to add my piece, people have been collectively brainwashed to place lot of value to essentially phantom points, be it instagram likes, followers on twitter, retweets and crypto. they are willing to go above and beyond to do the surveillance voluntarily.

I watched a piece on instagram thieves who chuckled how easy their victims make their job for them by showing off what they've got and when they are away from home. I imagine this is the same for people who believe they are building a startup legally.

Remember the quote from the biggest social media creator: "They trust me dumb **s"

[hilbert42]

Re rooted deGoogled phone. This is a huge topic and I cannot do it justice here. I suggest you look up the principles of phone rooting and or go to a repterable site on the subject such as XDA Developers.

Re: VPN, see my comment below to zen_1..

Re: Windows, yes, it's possible with routers and even a Raspberry Pi but it's equally complex and very different indeed to that of an Android phone.

Finally, I could have largey expanded my reasons for why I failed to fully understand the reasons why values within the population have changed in respect of privacy but I don't have the wherewithal to do it justice in the space available.

[upupandup]

thanks very much my friend is very pleased.

[bornfreddy]

She might also want to take s look at MurenaOS (LineageOS fork) and NetGuard.

[zen_1]

> degoogled phone

GrapheneOS on any pixel phone is my goto. It's way easier to install a custom ROM now than back in the day, anyone can do it if they can follow instructions (and reseat their phone cable if the process stalls after a phone reboot)

some banking apps don't work but apart from that it's 100% functional

> vpn

Mullvad (Sweden based) and Proton (Switzerland based) are two VPNs with a good reputation imo.

[hilbert42]

I'm sorry if I didn't explain the firewall VPN stuff well. Android lets one set up VPNs so firewalls exploit the concept to divert traffic from apps to a nul-VPN, apps think they've access to the internet but their traffic doesn't go anywhere.

This satisfies apps that demand such access, they'll still work on the premise that they have internet access, it's just that it's down all the time.

One such firewall app is Karma FW, it's available on Google's app store - and if you think you'd be violating your privacy even further by going there then use the Aurora Store app to spoof the download. As it violates Google's terms of service you have to get it from F-Droid's repository.

[zen_1]

I haven't run into apps like that before. I've always just denied the network permission or used AFWall+ (when rooted) to block network access from apps I don't want phoning home

[hilbert42]

The trouble with that (even on a rooted phone) is that the Google Play Services app collects info on everything, it's the most pernicious of any app. You only have to do the slightest thing on your phone and you can watch the size of its data file grow, thus routing its internet access to a VPN firewall is essential.

Unfortunately, Play Services uses the internet for various necessary functions. The only truly satisfactory solution is to remove it altogether and replace it with GApps which is a sort of 'clone' with the anti-privacy stuff removed.

[zen_1]

GrapheneOS supports installing Play services as a sandboxed unprivileged app [1] where you can revoke its network permissions and manually restore them if needed. I should know, it's what I do :).

If I could avoid using google software completely, I would, but this is the second best option IMO.

[1] https://grapheneos.org/faq#google-services

[propogandist]

is microG still a viable alternative to GApps or is there something else that’s taken its place?

The ROM community, especially those that cared about privacy, was quite small few years ago, especially for non-Pixel devices

[upupandup]

no worries think its pretty obvious what to do with here.

curious to know if some external firewall running on raspberry pi that sits between windows 10 desktop and the wifi exists. it would be ideal for inspecting network traffic