Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dwedge 5 days ago
This is totally unacceptable. But going to the hassle of running GrapheneOS and then using it to try and submit facial scans to combine your identity with your PSN account just seems so pointless.
2 comments

> But going to the hassle of running GrapheneOS and then using it to try and submit facial scans to combine your identity with your PSN account just seems so pointless. reply

Totally disagree. Everyone has a different threat model. Some people may solely be interested in the exploit protections and not care about their privacy. Some people might just like that it's completely open source or that there's no AI or it's bloat free.

I really dislike this maximalist, "ruin privacy" stance because it discourages people from making a small improvement if they can't be perfect. Changing to GrapheneOS is an insanely large privacy benefit compared to almost any other change and people might see this sort of sentiment and think there's no point if they use one privacy invasive app.

The thing is though that this kind of verification is going to be rife if we keep accepting it, and inconveniences like it not working (plus some banking apps) is almost the entire downside of GrapheneOS.

If you don't use it for things like this you don't really see any disadvantage. Occasionally I get cloudflare or vercel blocked when trying to read a blog but that's all.

So they're at a very strange intersection of using graphene but wanting to do exactly the kind of that is difficult on graphene. And just to be able to chat on PSN.

You're right though, different threat model.

Everyone should use Graphene. You don't have to be a privacy nut - it's also a version of Android that just works, efficiently, without bullshit, for you and not for Google. You should even install your privacy-violating apps on Graphene because that's better than having them on stock Android.
Not really, not all threat models are the same. Submitting face verification is different to Google knowing my location at all times.
That's fair and I do agree Google is the biggest threat. It's just that all these ID verifications are already tying you with Google (or Apple) in most cases
It was an example that’s not particularly bound to me. I use a cheap burner android for shitware smarthome apps I need to setup devices before they get adopted by Home Assistant - if I cared about specifically ID association with gapps, I’d probably use my burner for that too.

But I’m also under no illusion that Google has better analytics sources.