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Comment by Belopolye | Hacker News Reader

I realize this makes me sound black-pilled, but mobile platforms (Apple included) are so user-hostile with regard to privacy I’m not even sure the battle is worth fighting.

IMO it’s better to just hold your nose, limit what you use your phone for as much as you can, and do everything important/sensitive on a computer that you have root access on.

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can you expand on "user-hostile with regard to privacy"? I genuinely thought Apple is a lot more private than Samsung

In some ways yes, in others, no.

I enjoyed this discussion on Apple’s less-than-stellar privacy situation. Sources are in the video description.

https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=nQ9LR8homt4

God I wish I did anything interesting enough to merit that level of concern.

People are always unconcerned until their data leaks, then it turns out that the stuff they considered uninteresting was actually something they'd rather have kept private.

At that point I think my challenge is to not have anything you’d rather be private on a platform you don’t actually have control over, or why have it on a phone in the first place.

One of the most private things your phone knows about you is where you are at any given time. It's completely possible to design phones and cellular networks in such a way that they don't reveal that information to third parties, but we haven't, and that's bad.

I suppose that’s the other side of this. There’s a kind of privacy-as-ideology black hole that I’ve seen people get sucked into, even if in actuality they have nothing and do nothing actually illegal/immoral/sensitive.

Taking the time to install a custom ROM, run only FOSS apps, or find workarounds for needed apps, etc only to spend 90% of your time watching YouTube just doesn’t seem like a gain.

> Taking the time to install a custom ROM, run only FOSS apps, or find workarounds for needed apps, etc only to spend 90% of your time watching YouTube just doesn’t seem like a gain.

Think of it as reserving the right. Rights not exercised are lost. Retaining the ability to do something is valuable whether you need it right now or not. You may need it later.

That’s something I haven’t considered, although for me I would choose the route of forgoing a smart phone altogether if the ability to exercise that right was lost.

Why would that be less inconvenient than having a smartphone with open source software on it?

For my purposes there’s nothing that I can do on a FOSS smartphone that I can’t do more comfortably on my FOSS desktop.

Portability and the capacity to take pictures aside, but I also don’t go anywhere and my wife takes plenty of pictures of our kids anyway (backed up to my self-hosted NextCloud :^) ).

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