I am a long term GrapheneOS user and would like to talk about it. r/privacy on the redditland blocks custom OS discussions which I think is very bad for user privacy, and I hope this post will be useful to anyone who are in the hunt for better privacy.

Nowadays smartphones are a much bigger threats to our privacy and Desktop systems, and unfortunately manufacturers has designed them to be locked down devices with no user freedom. You can’t just “install Linux” on most smartphones and it is horrible. And most preloaded systems spy on us like crazy. That was why I specifically bought a pixel and loaded GOS onto it.

According to https://grapheneos.org/features , they start from base AOSP’s latest version, imptoves upon it’s security and significantly hardens it. There’s hardened_malloc to.prevent against exploitation, disabling lots of debugging features, disabling USB-c data, hardening the Linux kernel and system apps etc. They even block accessing the hardware identifiers of the phone so that apps cannot detect whqt phone you’re using. That means with Tor and zero permissions given, apps are anonymous.

Compatibility with apps are best in Custom ROMs but there are still that can’t work, especially if they enforce device integrity. Very few apps usually enforce that tho. Also their community isn’t the friendliest but you can get help. Just don’t try and engage too much or have too many debates.

Anyone else here use GrapheneOS, or any other privacy ROMs? What is your experience? Do you disagree on any point? Let’s have a discussion!

  • jet@hackertalks.com
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    30 days ago

    How do you like the cross profile notifications? What’s your workflow? Do you have multiple profiles active at the same time?

    • Object@sh.itjust.works
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      30 days ago

      I have one “Daily” profile where I keep thing I don’t mind showing others, and many other private profiles. Each private profile has a unique environment I find myself using every now and then, so it’s a bit like VMs. For example, one profile has VPN on 24/7, another with Orbot, and another with a non-functional VPN (which is basically no network). It enforces the rule so that I don’t fuck things up by accident. Primary profile is just a package manager for me.

      I have multiple profile active, but it’s usually just for long downloads. It was annoying whenever I go back to a profile expecting some long job to be done, only to find out it got killed 10 seconds after starting it. Or worse, finding out my Daily profile got killed.

      I don’t get many cross profile notifications because I almost never receive one outside of the Daily profile.