I am fucking scared of the mass surveilence nightmare direction that the internet and the world as a whole is going towards… C2PA, france hacking itself into citizen phones, the UK anti encryption law, EU’s chat control, etc. Im also sick of and hate the “you will own nothing and be happy” mentality that corpos try to push. I dont wanna know how the world will look like in 5-10 years.
It is an absolute nightmare, but you can gain some privacy back with ublock origin, an adblocking DNS on your phone, Firefox, a VPN, and ditching all things google/meta. As I type this out, I am reminded how much effort it takes to claw back your privacy…yeah OP, I’m with you, the modern internet is a profit-at-all-cost cesspool that can eat a moldy potato!
Ditching google is the most difficult part, especially when iPhone is so locked down :(
I’ve primarily been an iphone user over the years and was recently hand me downed an older pixel. Using grapheneOS and firefox, I was surprised to see there were only about a dozen extensions available, good ones, but not all of them like I’d assumed. Then I discovered chrome on android has zero, is that right? I cannot believe that there are so many people that use a mobile browser without an adblocker. On iOS safari, I have dozens of incredible extensions (basically countless through the app store) that make the internet useable again. I’m happy to see safari opening up.
You can get any extensions you want on Android with Firefox Beta (or Nightly) by creating a custom collection at addons.mozilla.org
Firefox on mobile has piles of apps generally now. No need for a list or nightly or beta.
There’s only a subset of addons available normally, this method lets you make any addons you want available on Android. This is what I’m referring to: https://www.androidpolice.com/install-add-on-extension-mozilla-firefox-android/
What?! I was under the impression that ad blocking is still impossible in iOS. What extensions do you use? I didn’t see uBlock origin in there.
Vinegar - $2 - Adblock for youtube, PiP, and enables background audio. In tandem with sponsorblock is absolutely stellar (in safari only, not the youtube app).
SponsorBlock - $3 - Removes sponsor segments from youtube videos (in safari only, not the youtube app).
Adguard - $12 maybe $6, their pricing is weird - Safari wide adblock. Also has a element picker that can remove headers, banners, etc to declutter, just like ublock origin on desktop.
TweaksforTwitter - $10? I think it got pulled down from the US app store. - De-shitifies Twitter.
StoptheMadness - $10 - So god damn much.
Hush - Free - Removes cookie banners and trackers.
Noir - $3 - Safari night mode for sites that don’t play along with system dark mode.
Rekt - $1 - Removes many “open in our app” banners and redirects amp links.
Sink for Reddit - Free - Removes reddit ads and ‘open in app’ banner.
Banish - $3 - Another option that removes many “open in our app” banners.
Userscripts - Free - Loads whatever custom 3rd party javascript of your choosing into sites.
A lot of these have redundant features, so something like StoptheMadness and Adguard might consolidate a lot of the others. I get that this looks like death by $3, but these are just what I’ve gathered over the years. I’d only recommend Adguard at a minimum, vinegar and sponsorblock if you don’t already have premium, and the others if they mean anything to you. Again these are all safari features so nothing that will change anything system wide or in other apps like youtube.
You can put Google-free Android forks on your phone or tablet. My phone is LinageOS with minimal Google footprint and my tablet has no gapps at all.
I use Gmail, Tasks, Drive and Calendar for the sake of convenience, since I could self-host all of these.
Do banking apps work?
Of course they work. Though if you’re rooted, you just need to install/flash a module named “Magiskhide” which will basically hide the apps your want from your root, as a lot of banking apps consider a rooted device not secure enough… (even if it completely is but whatever)
I’ve been looking into custom roms but for a bit but it will take a while before I feel confident enough to try it. I want to try it but I’m afraid that I will get locked out certain services like banks or ms365 for work. I’ll look into this Magishide tool.
(sorry for the late reply) Custom ROMs are something else and are in no way necessary for rooting the phone. You can totally root your phone with Magisk while staying on your manufacturer’s ROM, or flash (install) a custom ROM without rooting the phone and not being locked from anything your Android phone can already do. But you won’t have full access to your phone if you don’t root and will eventually need at least some degree of power over it, which is why most people root their phone too. But custom ROMs alone are also great, you can check if there are good ones (or if there are any) on xda-developers by searching your phone on it. But be careful and follow the instruction to the letter: you won’t be able to blame anybody for bricking your phone (look for hard brick and soft brick) as all authors clearly state they’re in no way responsible if you fuck up something and your phone doesn’t work anymore. The best thing to do as a beginner is to search deeply on the internet for days if not weeks in order to feel more confident and more importantly understand what is a ROM, what is a recovery (TWRP being the main one), a bootloader, etc, so you know what you’re going to do.
NFC and fingerprint scanner doesn’t.
How so? You can just use an iPhone without running any Google apps on it, right?
It’s sad, 10-15 years ago it was as simple as Adblock :/
Now it’s nearly unavoidable and/or requires quite a few changes to your native device to make it more secure
Yeah, for all of Jobs’ “vision” cell phones were really just a way to profit of of free information.
For mobile adblockers I recommend AdAway: https://github.com/AdAway/AdAway
Firefox mobile now supports extensions like uBlock Origin, although that only works for the web and not the whole phone.
I’m down to using Facebook in Firefox again. And reddit very occasionally too. Gostery,AdBlock, privacy possum, so many addons available for Firefox.
When you say Google/Meta, do not create a vacuum for people to fall into the Apple fake privacy rabbit hole. Androids can be used without a Google account. Apple devices are practically impossible to use without Apple account.