this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
66 points (97.1% liked)
Privacy
46762 readers
1429 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Being open source is not the only benefit of MicroG. It massages some (many) of the queries, removing as many bits of identifying information as possible. It lets you replace Google Location services with BeaconDB. And some other stuff.
These are all privacy wins. Practical ways to maintain as much of the functionality as possible, as much of the convenience, while minimizing the amount of information that is sent to Google (among others).
They come with a compromise in security. So this comes down to threat modeling. To use the naming from privacyguides.org, is your model includes "surveillance capitalism" but not "targeted attacks" then MicroG might even be better.
e/OS, while far from perfect, also adds a feature that blocks requests from tracking services using a blocklist. You can get that in 50 other ways, but this one does not drain my battery at 3x the speed, so I like it.
I do not claim that /e/OS is "better" than GrapheneOS, just that other ROMs can be a very good choice, depending of the user.
There is a reason why GrapheneOS is the golden standard, and if I were a journalist or activist in many parts of the world I would definitely stick to that and only that.
But that is why threat modeling exists. My threat model allows me a little more latitude, so I am not restricted to buying Pixels in an era when Google seems to be slowly undermining GrapheneOS, and I can choose a different manufacturer with better ethics. Among other things.
Of course, no question that with threat modeling you can arrive at /e/OS being an acceptable choice. However threat modeling is difficult and the devil is in the details, which is why I'm responding (mostly for the benefit of other readers of this thread) to provide the GrapheneOS side of things and avoid the impression that /e/OS offers unique or generally superior features in the areas we are discussing.
Here is GrapheneOS's network location implementation details. https://grapheneos.org/features#network-location
First a technical thing which is not obvious to me.
I understand that the general, non-proprietary Android system service would uses a privacy preserving service like BeaconDB. From what I understand, Google offers an alternative, proprietary, location API in its Play Services. Is that one also prevented from giving your location to Google of you're using Sandboxed Google Play?
It's an honest question. I assumed that the provider option I had in MicroG was exactly for that purpose, but I could be wrong.
Next, a small rant.
Bloody hell, I really do appreciate your politeness, but how is it that every damn article about privacy starts with threat modeling, but every discussion about privacy ends with "yeah but if your threat model does not require QubesOS you're doing it wrong"?
(I use Arch BTW)