Last month, I made the effort to find an older Pixel so I could install an alternative operating system on it. I’m a little bit of a privacy nut, but not nearly as nutty as I could be, so although I write a lot about my life in this blog (which has its own risks), my general belief is that your phone is an opsec nightmare, largely because of the walled gardens companies like Apple and Google bake into it, which few people seem to care about. They also seem to lie through their teeth on a regular basis. Using a de-Googled phone is something I’ve wanted to try for a very long time, but I simply haven’t had the motivation to install an alternative operating system on my own, even older Pixel.
I found a truly incredible deal. I won’t say how much I paid, but I think it is one of the cheapest I could find that wasn’t old and beat up, or otherwise harvested for a reseller/aggregator. I had to do a lot of digging on Reddit to learn how to spot scams, and sellers with good reviews are sometimes much riskier than you think. I found an independent seller whose feedback was predominantly as a buyer, who claimed to have used the phone very little, and who was clearly something of a phone nut, spending a lot of money on phones on a whim. So although the color was absolutely not my preference, it likely played a role in the price being as low as it was. But as far as I’m concerned, it has been a slam-dunk find, and may as well have been brand new.
Installing Graphene was a little tricky, but there are guides on YouTube, and as long as you follow the instructions to a tee, it should work just fine.
Now, it was a little odd at first because the Graphene app “store” isn’t anything like Google Play, and has an extremely limited number of options. It wasn’t until I installed F-Droid that I was able to really get things going. I use very few apps overall, but I really love the ones they host on F-Droid. My only concern about going “all-in” is that I will still need to install Play Store to get things like Gmail, Maps, etc., and use the phone for 2FA (which I hate with a passion). It kind of dawns on me, though…what if I didn’t check my email a million times a day? As it is, though, it’s really just a browsing box right now, but I like it.
Trapping you into one operating system is a common control tactic from Silicon Valley. Apple is notorious for this, and its already something of a hardware miracle that you can install something like Graphene on Pixel phones, or Calyx on Pixel phones and a few others. This should be the norm – you SHOULD be able to install any compatible operating system on any of your devices – but this actually puts you in control of the data that gets harvested from you, and Silicon Valley doesn’t like that. To me, installing something like Graphene is a way to take control back.
I seem to remember a story about a guy in France being questioned by police because he used a de-Googled phone and only used apps that were end-to-end encrypted. Maybe freedom rings different in the USA, but the French alphabet-boys apparently don’t like you taking your privacy seriously!
Very suspiciously, though, I’ve twice now received SMS-phishing text messages for WhatsApp 2FA, as well as a few cleverly-disguised failure-to-deliver emails. I don’t even have a WhatsApp, or end-to-end encrypted anything, because I’m too lazy to get friends to join me. Clearly a scam. But why now? I’ve never gotten these before.
It’s an interesting next-step in my own privacy journey. I was tempted to buy a brand-new phone, but I really wanted to test things out before I committed to spend that kind of money. My current phone is otherwise perfectly fine, but it’s old enough that it will some day need to be upgraded, for the sake of security updates, which is more proof that Silicon Valley does not give a shit about the environment, despite their platitudes. I’m just tired of Google geo-locating me, having their goddamned “health” sensors be something I can’t turn off, and being unable to remove their spyware apps. I frequently put my phone in airplane mode when going to the store, so stores can’t use wifi pings to track me around, but Google knows exactly where I’m at, at all times, and that really annoys me. “But Risky! Can’t you turn that off?!” Not really. Whereas you can toggle the Wifi, cell-service, Microphone, and Camera, they don’t give you an option to toggle GPS [CORRECTION: actually they do, calling it “Location”, but the option to “toggle” it isn’t really the same, and I seem to remember something about them always having access to your location, simply restricting it for apps. This may or may not be true. While the operating system is open-source, their own apps are not open-source, and you have to take them at their word, which is not something I really trust]. They love that sweet data. Sometimes I just want to read memes without my phone unlocks, time spent, GPS location, etc. being harvested in real-time. Makes my skin crawl.