Free Software Foundation announced its Librephone project to bring mobile phone freedom to users
“Librephone is a new initiative by the FSF with the goal of bringing full freedom to the mobile computing environment. The vast majority of software users around the world use a mobile phone as their primary computing device. After forty years of advocacy for computing freedom, the FSF will now work to bring the right to study, change, share, and modify the programs users depend on in their daily lives to mobile phones.”
There are of course a few such phone freedom projects on Android, but most have a few shortcomings still, and one of the shortcomings has often been that binary blobs are still included for various firmware drivers.
Such devices of course eliminate all the corporate spyware and tracking that Google, Apple, etc tend to pack into their phones. Bearing in mind of course if you install the Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Google Search, etc apps into this phone, you are just wide open again.
An issue for me though, on my last LineageOS phone, was my bank was detecting the phone was not locked down even though I had Magisk modules to mask the rooting. So we are also seeing in some cases that certain security apps may not run properly either. You just have to venture carefully into changes of phone OS and be sure what you need to use, will in fact work fine.
But more options are always good to see.
See https://www.fsf.org/news/librephone-project
#technology #privacy #tracking #opensource #android
