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Comment by throwawaysea | Hacker News Reader

So are there any privacy friendly phones outside of Apple’s ecosystem? I have been hoping someone would make a premium Android phone that is ungoogled and doesn’t play these games. Right now I have to choose between Apple’s tightly controlled walled garden and Android phones that are more open but not privacy friendly.

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There was that post a few days ago about Apples massive profit margins in the mobile phone space, which just seems to reinforce what this study is saying. Am watching the Pinephone space with massive hope for the future, though there is not much there for the present moment.

The beauty of Android is that you can usually install a more privacy focused OS if you want to. Besides that, there's the Android One program, which comes with the Google stuff and some related tracking inside it, but that's about it and it's probably on a similar level to Apple's tracking. And the rest depends on the apps you install, at least on Android there's F-Droid for FOSS apps only.

I haven’t owned an Android phone in a long while; but, back when I did, the phones I liked, the ones with very long battery lives, were not rootable and I couldn’t replace the OS.

Has that changed or can you replace the OS in all phones, now?

Maybe it depends on the country, but afaik, at least in the EU every phone is rootable. Some manufacturers impose restrictions ( e.g. for Xiaomi you need an account with them and have a maximum number per day of bootloader unlocks, supposedly to fight against third parties mass selling their hardware with extra crap/mal ware), and some app vendors may refuse to work on your rooted phone ( e.g. some banks), but that's it.

Huaweis have all had locked bootloaders for a while now, this us not an eu thing. Mosz vendors saw it as necessary evil to get the nerds on board I guess, but now with google locking down upstream aosp more and more that becomes less of a concern.

There's no good out-of-the-box privacy-friendly phone, but you can install a friendly OS on some devices.

Besides the article-mentioned /e/OS, there's also CalyxOS and GrapheneOS. GrapheneOS is seen as the top choice for tightest security, but also comes with the most downsides, being less compatibility with all your favorite apps, slower performance, lack of JIT compilation abilities (because it's unsafe), and, ironically, is completely limited to Google Pixel devices, which happen to have a black box "Titan" security chip that Google promised to open up but never did.

Why they think this unknown chip somehow makes the device more secure, I'll never know.

GrapheneOS and CalyxOS might have slightly less tracking, but are similarly anti-User as they do not grant any higher-level access to the user (root for example), and similarly enforce app authors' arbitrary restrictions against the user. All under the guise of "security".

Giving the user root access to the phone is one of the worst ideas you could possibly do with regards to security, which is why it's not possible. It's anti-user because the user is a huge source of information leakage and that's what the project is trying to protect, your information.

GrapheneOS also requires a lockable bootloader, because that is another attack vector. Malicious software could alter or downgrade the bootloader and load different software that could then spy on your device or read its contents.

Yet user-friendly Android options routinely tout features like "root access" and "unlocked bootloader" (LineageOS even requires it stay unlocked!)... but in reality these are enormous security holes that should not be there in the first place.

Just like how on the desktop... booting from recovery software or into a "single user mode" practically washes away all security and lets you access all the data. Besides encryption, things like Secure Boot and Mandatory Access Control should be used a lot more often to protect our data, but today unfortunately it is mostly relegated to mobile devices.

As long as device is encrypted properly I don't think security is washed away.

Single-user mode is clearly not what is happening with root. It's not like any app just can elevate to root, there's always a request requiring authorization, just like account elevation on windows and sudo on Linux. This is not idiot-proof, but if you view your users as idiots, that's telling... About the bootloader: root does not require secure boot off, if (!) root is built into the rom in the first place. In this case it still protects against many attacks. FS encryption protects against many of the remaining attacks. Lineageos does not offer root anyway, so that cannot be the reason it doesn't have secure boot. Its probably just that they do not have that focus on pixel, and other bootloaders don't support relocking security for custom roms.

The "guise of security"? You clearly don't understand the implications of the root account, and why it's a bad idea to give any app on your phone the potential to have that kind of power

Security cannot exist in vacuum, it always refers to a threat. That security you speak of is the security of apps against "attacks" by the user. This fight should take place on the app's backend, not the user's phone. The phone should be a user's agent, not an idiot-proof tool of oppression.

I think Librem and the Pinephone are the only options with some privacy features. None of them runs Android, however.

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