Edward Snowden on privacy and threats to democracy (2019) [video]

Tech discussion begins at 14:00.

At 21:00 [0] Snowden calls for [developers to build] smartphone tools to let users take control of their devices (wouldn't be for the first time). While a no-root, user-space firewall can only do so much (Daniel Micay will attest to that [1] :), that's what we are building with RethinkDNS (https://github.com/celzero/rethink-app) for Android phones, picking up where WhisperSystems left off [2]. This other complementary Android app (doesn't require root, but does require "developer mode" turned on) I use, gives a lot more control over installed apps and its components (no so much over the device's network itself): https://github.com/MuntashirAkon/AppManager

While Google continues to make significant improvements [3], security-focused Android distributions like CalyxOS and Graphene remain the best avenues to tackle privacy concerns today, but most of the 2B+ Android users don't really want to root devices let alone flash ROMs. Most Chinese OEMs (Vivo, Oppo, OnePlus, Realme, Xiaomi) do bundle in (pretty decent though limited) firewalls but they do not let one visualize or block individual network requests.

It'd be quite sometime before the Android/Fuchsia-iOS duopoly is displaced from its perch, but technology-wise, my longer-term hopes are pinned on Linux-based phones (PINE64, Librem) for now.

Of course, laws and regulations upholding digital privacy are the real end-game, and it remains to be seen how much headway is made on that front in the coming decade.

[0] https://youtu.be/e9yK1QndJSM?t=1261

[1] https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/389

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20110506050715/http://www.whispe...

[3] https://security.googleblog.com/search/label/android