Google Starts Tracking Your Phone As Chrome And Gemini Change
Google Starts Tracking Your Phone As Chrome And Gemini Change
www.forbes.com
Google Starts Tracking Your Phone As Chrome And Gemini Change
29 comments
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Disabling "Google" app seems to break A LOT of data mining. So make sure you disable that crap. Also disable Chrome and uninstall/disable Gemini. Also use DNS level filtering like NextDNS or AdguardDNS. The amount of crap these filter while not affecting my usage of smartphone is wild. And I'm using Hagezi Ultimate which is the most aggressive block list.
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Everything Google on my phone is disabled, no Play store or services either. Someone needs to start a privacy focused OS that is pure Linux and widely available worldwide.
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There's a few ungoogled privacy OSes. Graphine, Lineage, CalyxOS, Plasma, and a half dozen others. They're very model specific.
There are also mobile Ubuntu and a "Linux phone" setup.
The problem with Linux phones is that, AFAIK, calling and SMS are not supported. Which is kind of important for a phone to do the basic definition of a phone. In the privacy comms, people who have used them flatly say that a Linux phone is no where near ready to be seriously used by anyone as a real replacement for Android.
You're not wrong that a more universal phone OS needs to be out there, but since the hardware varies so oddly by manufacturer, devs can't rely plan for new drivers and test well. That's why Graphine sticks to ONLY Google Pixel hardware, to keep the driver set smaller and easier to test.
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I've heard of something called GrapheneOS which the privacy community seem to like. The installation guide has my head spinning so I haven't done it, but if it's something you want to look into, there you go.
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The installation couldn't be more simple...just use the web installer and follow the simple instructions of when to click.
I've been installing custom ROMs since 4.0, and the advent of web installers, such as for Graphene, are the easiest ROMs I've ever flashed.
Much simpler than even the custom recovery route, which was already fairly straightforward, but this is even easier IMO.
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it's only for google pixel phones. not widely available worldwide!
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Ironic...
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I don't use Gemini nor chrome, will they still track me?
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Yes.
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I was going to try to answer this, but I'd just be copy pasting the article. There's no real possible TLDR.
Which is probably by design, but still.
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It's not so much about whether or not they are recording data on you. If you are using an Android device, they are collecting info about you for sure. It's about how much data you allow them to collect by using their apps. Using any of the Gapps allows them to collect some information about you. From the Play Store on down to Keep, they are collecting whatever info they can.
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I mean, Gapps itself is already tracking your activities.
29 comments
"starts"?
Seriously, did we time travel back to 2012?
Quick, find some Bitcoin!
Yeah the title has no meaning since everyone knows they already do that. They should be more specific