Seems you have to compromise on HW openness and ethics vs paranoia.
If you're just a rando like me yes, it's paranoia.
Once open models catch up to the current frontier in vulnerability exploitation, the cost to target people will go way down. In the past, the cost to hack a random individual person was generally high enough that if there wasn't some special reason to hack you in particular, it wasn't worth it. That may no longer be the case in the near future. The floor of what is acceptable security for the General Public probably needs to rise quite a bit over the next few years.
Its just raising the bar across the board, I don't see how only attackers would benefit.
Even if you haven't done anything "wrong", you may have engaged in speech or activities that the current US admin has deemed problematic and will try to punish you for if they can find any evidence.
Fairphones are closed source hardware with closed source firmware and closed source userspace drivers. Fairphones are less open than Pixels, not more open.
It isn't truly known how a Fairphone compares to an iPhone or Pixel when it comes to environmental impact or fairness to workers. Fairphones are designed and built by T2Mobile since the Fairphone 4. T2Mobile barely has any public information available about it. There isn't information on the working conditions, pay and other aspects of of it. The same applies to the rest of the supply chain. Fairphone provides a list of companies involved in the supply chain without details.
It isn't truly known how a Fairphone compares to an iPhone or Pixel when it comes to environmental impact or fairness to workers. Fairphones are designed and built by T2Mobile since the Fairphone 4. T2Mobile barely has any public information available about it. There isn't information on the working conditions, pay and other aspects of of it. The same applies to the rest of the supply chain. Fairphone provides a list of companies involved in the supply chain without details.
I really would like to mention that many times, using /e/OS or LineageOS (or the likes) means that you get worse security than Stock Android.
It would be fine to run /e/OS or LineageOS on a Pixel, assuming those Android systems are not too slow with updates (my experience with my /e/OS phone was that they were 4 years behind as compared to Stock Android).
But really, if you have a Pixel, it doesn't really make sense to use something other than GrapheneOS IMO.
So to me it's really:
- GrapheneOS if you can
- Stock Android vs an alternative otherwise
Both /e/ and LineageOS lag far behind on current security updates on a Pixel. Neither is based on Android 17 yet which was released in June 2026. Neither has the June 2026 or later Pixel firmware, kernel, driver and HAL patches. Both also roll back the standard security of AOSP but /e/ does so much more than LineageOS.
The latest releases of LineageOS for Pixels do not provide the June 2026 and later updates to the firmware, kernel, drivers and HALs because those have only been provided for Android 17 since it was released and LineageOS isn't yet based on Android 17. Separately from that, since Lineage is still based on Android 16 QPR2 it also doesn't include the many privacy and security patches not backported from Android 17.
Android ships many security patches as part of the QPR2 and yearly releases which are not backported to older releases. The backports to older releases are increasingly incomplete. Years ago, they stopped backporting any Low and Moderate severity patches to older releases and more recently they've been scaling back the amount of High and Critical severity patches which are backported. An official policy announcement was made to OEMs that they'd no longer backport many High and Critical severity patches where an LLM discovered the vulnerability internally due to the large volume of patches.
Pixels move to the latest OS releases and that means the firmware, kernel, driver and HAL code is only provided for those. It's most difficult for the major yearly releases due to the new API level but it's not trivial for QPR1, QPR2 and QPR3 either.