In regards to privacy… even when trying to use FOSS-alternatives and F-Droid on Android?
It’s worse. You are giving the planet’s largest and most powerful ad selling platform access to every aspect of your life. Windows doesn’t know where you are every second of the day or read your texts. Google is terrifying.
But but they don’t sell your data /s
Yeah silly it’s too valuable, they hoard it and sell services that are powered by your data.
It’s a great income stream. Google charges oems a fee for running Android. Then charges consumers a fee when they spend money on apps or buy things with Google pay. Then charges for ads using your private data, and ads are reported to be the biggest income stream overall for the company, including search on desktop.
Google puts telemetry in the default keyboard app. Let that sink in for a moment.
Good moment to plug this open source alternative https://github.com/Helium314/HeliBoard First usable one imo
It’s even worse because phones have cameras and microphones and I believe Google uses the latter for tracking for ad related purposes.
I think it’s been proven that Google doesn’t listen in to your conversations. While there are a lot of real privacy issues, the microphone theory is just conspiracy fear-mongering
I have proofs of them listening good enough to believe it’s true.
at my last job during every break my fb-addict coworker would always get ads on facebook on her iphone that were exactly about what we were discussing a few minutes earlier. became very clear there was some eavesdropping going on.
Worse, probably, because your PC doesn’t have a lot of the sensors your phone does. But I guess it depends on what you’re trying to keep private.
Yeah that’s a fairly reasonable comparison.
I want to go google-less, but I do have paid apps from google play that I must sign in to download.
Anything you “purchase” on the Play store is more of a rental.
With that being said you could look into MicroG and Aurora store. It may work it may not
I am using MicroG which works fine, I have tried Aurora, but wont recognize paid apps (have the option to purchase again).
Anything you “purchase” on the Play store is more of a rental.
So … arrrr?
Use apps from F-droid
Eh, kinda. It’s not quite as easy to escape from GApps as it is to install Linux, though, so it’s understandable.
My advice is to look into LineageOS, DivestOS, and GrapheneOS and see if your device is supported by anyone. If not, it’s possible to remove GApps using ADB, and you can use NextDNS to block tracking.
Its a pretty low bar but Android is going to be more private then Windows. Google having privileged access to your phone is still terrible but Windows doesn’t really have any privacy protections by default. Android at least does things such as sandboxing its non privileged apps. It also provides a lot better hardware security for your data then most Windows devices would…outside of secure core pcs its pretty trash for hardware privacy in the Windows world.
i think they are both equally privacy intrusive by default but if you take the time to get rid of telemetry and the gapps then android will be better then running windows on your pc
