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Your smartphone transmits your location to corporate servers every 4.5 minutes, even when you've explicitly opted out. It knows which medical clinics you visit, which protests you attend, and which friends you spend nights with, and this information is sold to data brokers, advertisers, and government agencies without meaningful consent. GrapheneOS is an open-source operating system that transforms Google Pixel hardware into a private device under your control, one that has proven resistant to Cellebrite forensic extraction tools used by law enforcement worldwide. This guide covers the surveillance problem, the technical architecture that solves it, and a complete walkthrough from installation to hardened configuration with privacy-respecting applications.
Max's avatar Max
Your Phone Is Not Your Property (Until You Install GrapheneOS)
Your smartphone surveils you by design. GrapheneOS transforms a Pixel into private hardware you actually control. Here's why it matters and how to do it.
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For those who don’t have the gumption to ditch their current phone and OS, an easy way to help mitigate tracking is deleting the weather app. It consistently pings your location not just for weather data but also enables companies to more specifically track you, market to you, and sell your data. So if you’re not diving head first into GrapheneOS, delete the weather app on your current device and download an open source privacy respecting version for slightly upgraded privacy.
Been experiencing a lot of issues with my grapheneos ever since I plugged to charge in a rental car :/ anytime my battery dies it takes a massive amount of effort to turn it back on and always stalls on the grapheneos logo just sits there and I have to pres power and sound buttons to restart and then pause for it to first regain charge before powering. It's weird and frustrating. I think I've been hacked. I woke up today wanting to just juke it.... Like reset from ground 0 but unsure how yet.
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↩ replying to Diyana
Make sure you set the USB C port to charging only even when unlocked, this might have prevented the exploit. There are also power only USB cables or adapters who cut the data cable connection. Yes, it is a good idea to regularly reinstall graphene os and start from zero, make sure you have all backups.
Ey Max! Guiness World Record Installing @grapheneOS is ours. 🔥🔥🔥🤓
Ready To Prepare's avatar Ready To Prepare
----------------------------------------- PoW Ready to Prepare 001 ----------------------------------------- image 🏁 Enjoying looking for the best pixel offer in markets. 35' connecting and flashing 45' downloading the set up of app's ▶️ Markets F Droid Accrescent Aurora Store Zapstore ▶️ Privacy Tools Exif eraser Scramble Egg Image tool Privacy blur ▶️ Maps Organic maps OpenStreet Maps ▶️ Tor Tor browser Orbot ▶️ Vpn Ivpn Proton vpn Mullvad ▶️ Browser Privacy set up of: Vanadium Brave ▶️ Dns Rethink Dns Nextdns And few more surprises 🤠 ✅ Plug and play. Ready to Prepare. Would you like exploring how life is much safer with @GrapheneOS ? #technology #privacy #freedom
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Given the slave-centered nature of the mobile infrastructure, the only logic conclusion is to opt-out the whole mobile ecosystem, until there are more reasonable alternatives. Continuous friction with the limits is not only tiring, but unfair with the user. If the corporate world wants mobile-centered-identity, let them pay for it. Why should I buy an expensive device just to discover how much crippled is it against my own interests? The government may force you to have a bank account, but the same bank cannot mandate you to own a phone. Do you sell freedom? Really?
Does one totally negate the benefits of using a “privacy phone” if they are constantly in the company of people who are using Swiss cheese devices and apps? I can’t even get my circle of people to adopt encrypted chat apps and get the fuck off Fakebook. Seems pointless to get all James Bond, other than as an educational exercise, when surrounded by data leakers and outright big tech platform shit posters. #asknostr
I also switched to Graphene a couple of months now and it is surprisingly good. Maybe it is because I use anyway a lot of Open source tools. Everything exists maybe not that convenient but it works. Honestly the only thing I really miss is pay by Google pay and I know it is silly because it tracks every transaction to create a nice profile but it was so darn convenient.
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↩ replying to Max
Now I'll freely admit, I don't know much about chip design, but I watched something a long while back where someone showed that there are parts of chips which aren't made clear on manufacturer's details, posts which aren't clarified. That's what got me thinking... Why would Google, who were founded for the purpose of mass surveillance, provide a tool which can bypass it? It doesn't make sense. So if another company is going to make hardware which Graphene will work with, I'd be much more interested to learn more. All the while it's on Google hardware it's not for me. They can watch me openly, like they currently do, on Amdroid.
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↩ replying to Diyana
The Pixel 8's Tensor G3 chip pairs with an upgraded Titan M2 security coprocessor to isolate sensitive cryptographic operations, while introducing Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) support for runtime detection of memory corruption vulnerabilities and significantly hardening the cellular baseband firmware with bounds sanitizers, integer overflow protection, stack canaries, and control flow integrity to reduce what has historically been a major attack surface. That's a major improvement compared to the 7 or earlier generations.
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↩ replying to Diyana
8s are fine, especially if you have it already or want the cheapest option. Both 9 and 10 are marginal improvements in build quality, performance, battery, and they will receive updates for one or two years longer (standard is 7 years official support from google, Graphene usually supports even longer)