Technology

Yeah, I saw that one the other day. Definitely a cool project. I might take a deeper look at it at some point.

Yeah, that's the more realistic option. Though it would cost several hundred dollars more.

Not that I have a better idea, but Graphene os devs I think were found to be scummy by Louis Rossmann at some point.

What if you take the battery from a small laptop? It may still be bigger than a whole smartphone, but comparatively small and with some ten watt-hours.

Yes, considering the average westerner’s privacy is essentially exploited by Google every single day, telling the privacy-conscious person to just shut up and buy the Google phone without discussing alternatives makes this website read like it’s just another ad on an internet filled with ads.

pixels are supported for 7 years now, and older second-hand phone is still an option. but agree on privacy being a spectrum and not an absolute.

Pixels are also running on poor hardware. This has always been the case, but recent releases are showing really poor cpu performance compared to competitors.

Edit: for example, the OnePlus 13 that was released 8 months before the Pixel 10 Pro is 40%+ faster, and $150-250 cheaper. The battery is also 20% lower capacity.

I used to think like this. However, if someone says, "The most expensive phone I can afford is embedded with unremovable Israeli spyware, and there is no operating system that is open-source and receives regular security patches available for it, and I can't afford to pay for internet access, so I use the platform that only lets me access Facebook", I'm not sure that there's much I can do to help them. If someone said, "Can I use a phone that costs less because it's subsidized by Facebook while being protected from malware and surveillance?" I'd respond with, "The answer is probably 'no'". I'm sure that it's possible to be in a situation where the only choice is to have no internet access at all or to use the internet in a way that makes one vulnerable to surveillance, and I think it's likely that getting more money is the most reliable cure for that situation (and it might be true that no other cure exists).

privacyguides.org probably has a target audience of people that are being actively targeted by sophisticated government actors, and displaying information about a measure that is inferior to another measure in every way other than cost would make it more likely that someone would use the inferior measure in an inappropriate situation, and that could cause someone to be in physical danger, so it's probably best to just not mention any measure unless it might be superior to all other measures in some situation (without considering monetary cost). For people that are subject to less physical danger but more cost restrictions, it'd probably be better to have a separate website. I do think that such a website would probably have less funding available (since privacyguides.org will probably receive funding from the audience that is mostly unencumbered by resource constraints, so any other website will probably receive less funding) and therefore less expertise available, which would be regrettable (since I do have old phones that I'd like to make more secure).

There was a time when there was no formal recommendation for computing hardware from privacyguides.org at all, so having one at all is an improvement compared to the past. It's unfortunate that there aren't two options that meet the documented criteria, but having one is better than having none. For now, the best we can hope for is probably a phone model that meets relevant criteria (or where the only unmet criteria could be met due to new software being made available) becoming more popular, such that its price comes down due to having an economy of scale. Hopefully that will be a phone model not influenced by Google.