Smartphone startups take on Google, Apple and put privacy first
dw.com
dw.com
I also take issue with a lot of articles talking about data collection as the boogeyman without actually explaining how data collection happens and how to minimize it.
You don’t have to actually get rid of Apple or Google, which can massively handicap the usability of your device, to gain some semblance of privacy. There are a lot of simple changes to be made:
- Turning off location history in Google and Apple Maps
- Auditing Google/Apple/social media account privacy settings
- Make sure you’re on a recent/the latest Android version
- Audit and minimize app permissions
- Uninstall apps that you don’t need or have web alternatives
- Installing content blockers on web browsers
- Set up a PiHole
- On Android, you could switch to an alternative App Store like F-Droid
I suggest these sorts of thing only because these projects, while very admirable, are years away from being viable alternatives. Most smartphone users outside the technically inclined would absolutely not make the trade-offs required to live with something like a Librem or even giving up Google Play on LineageOS.
The other issue I take with articles like this is that they fail to understand the value that data collection can provide to consumers as well. A lot of useful features actually depend on using your data. The assumption that the consumer is unhappy about this trade-off is not necessarily correct.
A great example of that concept is how Google and Apple use aggregated location information to determine traffic conditions. This is a highly useful feature to most smartphone owners. It would be impossible to implement without collecting location data.
That’s just one example of many. In many ways the utility of the smartphone outshines the personal computer precisely because it can gather more data from more sensors to be put to use.
Fighting Apple and Google with alternatives is a losing battle if you ask me - privacy will never be protected until strong regulations with real teeth become universal.
In reality, there will never be more than two smartphone operating systems that any significant number of the public use. If you don’t believe me just look to the personal computer world - in 30 years has any operating system gained any more traction than Windows or macOS? Sure, Desktop Linux is more usable and popular than ever, but the fact remains that 95%+ of the general population still doesn’t use it. While me and my technically inclined friends can finally use Linux as a daily driver and even play AAA commercial video games on it, something of a pipe dream 10 years ago, that doesn’t help the 90% of people that are still on Windows. That desktop computing situation is a lot like the future of smartphones - Apple and Google aren’t going anywhere. That’s why I say that regulations and laws are going to be the only way to reign in mass data collection, because getting people to switch to alternatives will never be more than 5% effective.
The article, submitted by u/indidea (Gael Duval) [0], sounds like a PR piece for eelo aka https://e.foundation/ which was subject to controversy not long ago [1].
Both https://grapheneos.org/ and https://lineageos.org/ are comparable alternatives, though /e/ really aims to go "full-stack" and comes pre-configured with alternative cloud-services to Google's.
Google dark patterns make this a no-go. I have multiple locations stored on my Google maps. With location history turned off I was fine until a few months ago when maps told me in order to access that data I need to turn location history back on. So google cripples their software unless you turn on tracking.
But in this case it seems clearly wrong.
https://en.mapy.cz/, https://maps.me/ - Google Maps is useless anyway.
Care to elaborate on that? It seems very useful, considering the amount of people that use it on a daily basis
If you want to be a bit more paranoid, on iOS Privacy > Location Services > Off
... not that I would do that, I find it too useful.
- they're explicitly not taking a profit, so unlikely to aggressively rev hardware - little to no software development by the parent company - little to no marketing by the parent company
Purism is developing an app store, productivity suite, and revving the software with full time employees. They're pushing the marketing hard even before the product is ready. They're already talking about a new hardware rev (batch Fir). That's pretty much a direct competitor to both Google and Apple. /e/ is essentially an Android fork, so it's a direct competitor to Google.
Sailfish might be a direct competitor, but I just don't see the PinePhone as even being interested in this space. One of the projects that's being ported to the device could become a competitor (e.g. Canonical could take up development of Ubuntu Touch again), but Pine64 just doesn't seem interested. It's a hobbyist device, and I wouldn't be surprised if Android gets ported and Pine64 offers that as a factory installation option.
How can I do that? You do realize it's not exactly easy to update the phone after the support is dropped by OEM. LinageOS lately seems for me to not be a relevant option if you want latest OS for an older phone. I have Nexus 5x and could not find any reliably working ROM for it quite some time ago. Now it may be better, it may be worse.
I really mean it. I know that is not what you want to hear, but that’s the reality.
Every version of Android below Android P allows apps to access the camera from the background without consent:
https://www.xda-developers.com/android-p-background-apps-cam...
I don’t like disposable hardware as much as the next person but I’m absolutely not going to go without basic security to die on that hill.
We should absolutely encourage awareness of existing privacy solutions, but we also need to point out their weaknesses and build another solution that addresses those weaknesses.
It seems that it's still more a prototype than a functioning phone, where even basic functionality like replying to a SMS is not implemented yet. That's not really surprising or discouraging though, it's simply a lot of software that you have to reimplement, so even attaining feature parity with current phones seems quite difficult with this approach.
I think we need a political/organizational solution to the privacy problem, fighting back with technology will not work.
Taking aside the usability issues I think these initiatives are fantastic though and while I don't think they will replace current smartphones they might find unexpected markets that can benefit from the open approach. For example, I think an affordable, fully open mobile computing device could become as successful as the Raspberry Pi and provide a great platform for many innovative, data-driven mobile applications.
I agree, and I'd add that that's because there isn't much money in privacy at the moment, and there's a lot of money in violating privacy. And, that's probably because there's too many people who don't understand privacy in technology, or don't consider it a priority. I think that regulation can't come soon enough. Anyone who helps privacy and tech politics move faster is a hero.
It's a real problem and it will get more prevalent the more data we collect. I think we're only at the beginning of the data-driven economy and there's still so much potential for harnessing data to improve things, but we have to ensure the security of the data and the privacy of the persons that it belongs to.
We don't have one because most people (voters) don't care: https://jakeseliger.com/2018/11/14/is-there-an-actual-facebo.... When/if people change their behaviors, we'll see change.
Like https://www.eff.org/ ?
I think Privacy as a right comes when we get rid of politicians beholden to corporate interests. Luckily there's a lot of interest in that right now.
Once we start to remove Corporate interests from the loop then legislation enshrining privacy can allow startups like Purism to really shine, and force Apple and others to step up their game.
Initially the phone had a following and if Microsoft built that following up, developers would have jumped on board.
Microsoft screwed up badly while they still had the chance by changing paradigms rapidly. They (correctly) tried to pay developers to build apps for them, since you don't really need a million apps, you just need the top 30 to work. The problem was that Google owns many of these top 30 and they weren't interested in helping Microsoft obviously. You can't have a winning mobile platform without YouTube, Maps, and for many, Photos/Gmail/Translate.
On the other hand the Librem 5 can apparently install the 60000 packages Debian supports, all of them respecting the user out of the box.
Privacy is an wonderful opportunity. Your system can be worse in pretty much every aspect, but simply by blocking stuff and even better, not doing things, you turn that into an advantage. It may stay a niche thing, but there is a market left open by the tech giants.
That said, my own skepticism with this article comes from the fact that from reading this, I didn't take away anything about their privacy stance except "We don't share your data with Google or Apple" so I can't tell if they're actually pro-privacy or just anti-Google/Apple
https://mobile.twitter.com/thelinuxgamer/status/121251196907...
Unless the point is to lock down the phone so strictly that no info can leak or be taken off the phone. That's simple. But that would make a phone that's practically useless for everyday personal use except if you're a paranoid spy.
I guess the need to have privacy and security while offering users some level of reasonable usability through 3rd party apps is why Google and Apple are succeeding in the face of such privacy focused startups.
Agree! In the end, people want to use their phones to socialize online, share pics, use maps, check weather, sync files and photos to the cloud. When you remove too much, and make the entry barrier too high, people will just ignore it.
Google Photos lets me back up photos from my phone AND copy them to my PC. I haven't found any other way to copy photos from an iPhone into a laptop (unless you use macOS). Since they already handle my photos, I might as well use it for backups.
And Google Maps is pretty uncontested when it comes to moving around. Apple Maps doesn't even have a "biking" option (in a country where > 90% of the population bike everywhere, that's a killer).
I use it in conjunction with Google Photos as a secondary back-up of the original photos (to the local drive and a thrid-party cloud back-up)
iMazing does this, and is available for MacOS and Windows.
https://imazing.com/guides/how-to-transfer-iphone-ipad-or-ip...
I've used third party utilities for mounting GDrive locally, but they're kind of a pain to use and aren't official by any stretch of the imagination. All of my personal computers run Linux exclusively, and only my wife's desktop runs Windows in our house, so Google Photos doesn't mean much to me.
Both SyncThing and Resilio Sync work well for this, but require your "server"/laptop to be on in order to sync.
You can also just plug in the device, and it should mount as USB storage on both Windows and Linux.
(I have no financial interest in either pieces of software, other than regularly needing to recommend them to my PhotoStructure users).
It already has best-of-class deduping, "variant" clustering support, and metadata inference, as well as a UI that makes browsing very large libraries feel serendipitous. I release roughly every month, and it's free (in exchange for feedback) during the closed beta. Here's what's coming soon: https://photostructure.com/about/release-notes/
I've been making this case for over a year now, and I'm very pleased to see someone else making it too. It's an incredibly important point that not enough people are bringing up.
When it comes to privacy, the tech community is full of contradictions and double-standards. Too many people in the field view privacy solely through the lens of security i.e. if your data is securely held and never leaked that is good enough - no matter how much data is captured. This suits the tech giants very well. In fact, it appears to be how many of these tech giants view privacy themselves.
Of course, you can't have privacy without security. But security simply by itself does not equal privacy. Questions about how much data is held about users, or how relentless is the level of tracking are rarely raised. (Until some of that user data gets leaked and we get a glimpse of the sheer volume of data held.)
Another example: the language around tracking users. It's purposefully worded to sound benign or neutral: telemetry, analytics, web beacons, logging. We don't challenge the use of this language - we gladly use it ourselves.
> Of course, you can't have privacy without security. But security simply by itself does not equal privacy.
Privacy is not the same as security, and I agree that you can't have privacy without security. I also think that you can't have security without privacy.
This is part of why the argument that some companies make about how securely they're holding our data is a nonstarter for me. That form of security only comes into play after the first form of security: preventing the unauthorized data collection. If the companies don't have my data, then their security practices around how they protect my data don't matter.
And audit all android code & third-party apps.
For wider adoption, I think this would be necessary. Otherwise these phones will always remain a niche product.
I could see there being a filter for apps without google dependencies.
That said, I think F-Droid is still the better choice. If the source isn't open, then it'll be hard to prove that the apps aren't degoogled in the first place.
I think you meant https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.aurora.store/ ? microg hasn't worked with play store for a while now.
When I was involved in a phone project we were provided a firmware blob for the baseband and it had DMA to the main processor. We did quite a bit of RF fuzzing and well, the results are what you would expect.
Microsoft had a better approach once, still expensive/buggy, but at least more doable, which was adapting the various iOS kits and calling back window primitives in the backend.
And yet, they abandoned because its also a bad move in the sense that nobody will care about your platform if they just need to target iOS.
You will be doomed and have to chase and implement everything they do in iOS, even if it doesnt make sense, and nobody will care about your platform.
You will also end with more bugs and application crashes, so your platform will be seing as something inferior to Apple (emphasizing the "nobody cares about you" effect)
By the way, Blackberry took that route by implementing Android and we can see how nobody cares about Blackberry as an app platform, because in the end you know they will have to follow Android.
For me the only way to get out of this trap, is to have a distinct platform, that for some reason, people want to develop for it.
I mean, the web did this trick once, Linux is also doing this. Its doable, but its a lot of hard work and community effort based a lot in other goals other than cash.
Another way to do this trick, is to create a consortium, and to create some base API, inspired by iOS, Android and the Web, and to have a lot of industry leaders onboard.
They would need to finance the prototype or the reference implementation on top of something like Linux.
It was tried with Tizen, but given it was more of a Samsumg project without community to drive it forward it failed. Also, i dont think it can compete with Android and iOS in platform quality.. so this probably was also one of the reasons they have failed.