twikz

I dont wanna mess with the security of my device, and in my experience, getting rid of Googles tracking entirely is kind of inconvenient,

in my country people can look you up and know where you live, but they most probably cant hack your gps and find you, maybe the government can but im not hiding from the government.

But the point of my post is looking for what options there are to limit the data im feeding to big corps like google, i cant degoogle completely unfortunately

How is it ironic, I want to find a balance with privacy and convenience.

What people have told me earlier, is that it's a bunch of sacrificing to have better privacy.

I've tried graphenOS on a pixel, not using and having google track you means you lose the convenience of really good gps accuracy. For me using only Mozillas location service resulted in slow and inaccurate GPS, could probably have tried to tinker more with it but it had problems even under roofs to get a lock on my location.

That doesn't work for me when my phone is a tool. That's an example of a sacrifice I don't feel like making in my life right now, I also need to use some microsoft and google products for what I'm studying for, which means I cant get rid of privacy invasive stuff altogether, which is why im asking here to see what my options are so I can put something together that works for me

I said in my post that I dont like google, dont like the ui or ux of anything related to google.

I don't like the ux on Samsung either, and I kind of got stuck with this phone a bit back by my own fault.

I don't think ios is a better solution for privacy or anything related to that, I just prefer iOS and I wanted to see what my options are when I make the switch, I apologize if I offend anyone for mentioning iOS.

The reason for not using a custom rom on my Samsung is because alot of people have been telling me to stick to stock OS on Samsung, its the recommended thing to do for security if I remember correctly (got told this by a guy in the grapheneOS community)

Regarding Apple, That's what I feel too, but I don't feel like going Pixel and GrapheneOS or fairphone etc.

But I still want to optimize my privacy and move to open source alternatives where I can without sacrificing too much

You mean its more possible on Samsung?

You make a good point tbh

That's a struggle, but I've heard of some great music storage self hosting services out there, can't remember the names of any atm tho

There is also the option of sideloading a modded YouTube client for the adblock aspect.

I was thinking about getting 256GB version of the phone and self hosting a storage solution, but I ain't got the server to do that yet, might aswell pay for icloud drive until I finish my studies. Luckily I dont need alot of storage, just need the security of having stuff backed up.

I also selfhost adguard home over my home network.

Yeah I guess getting hate for choosing Apple is fair, I was anti-apple a few years ago but now I would rather get rid of Google, and ios isnt bad nowadays either for my use cases.

I could just go for a fairphone tho with /e/OS tho

That's funny, if I truly wanted zero spyware, I'd go with a Fairphone running /e/OS. But even then, I'd still need certain government apps to function as a citizen. Since I prefer Apple over Google and I'm not ready to go full privacy-hardened, I'd rather find a balance between convenience and privacy protection.

On phone there is Grayjay and Youtube Revanced, on iOS there is modded versions of youtube that you can sideload that removes ads. But perhaps you were talking about ditching the youtube platform entirely

Pretty sure it was developed in germany

Matrix is open source, should give that a try,

it could be a bit more user friendly tho