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The final line of the article is pretty dismissive of the whole project:

> While the /e/ Foundation does have an ambitious goal of protecting people's privacy, we live in an age where nothing is really private, so a phone that caters to those concerned about their privacy makes very little sense.

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Yeah, I found that comment to be unhelpful. But there are hard questions here, and merely dropping Google components doesn't really provide satisfying answers. A "phone" needs to facilitate communicating with others. A "smart phone" should run apps many of which do at least some communication with various web services. If the whole system around your phone isn't trying to preserve your privacy, can your phone's OS really protect it? If you lock down stuff to the point where you are confident you're not leaking a trail of potentially identifying info, how useful is the phone?

That line also stuck out to me and seems a bit short sited.

The claim that we live in a world with no privacy could also lead to the conclusion that the supply of privacy could potentially be far below the demand, and thus be a prime market to tap.

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