Chrome sounds more secure
Chromium is not the same as Chrome. I highly suggest reading the previous posts.
yet I don’t want an advertising company looking at my browsing habbits
There are more privacy respecting options such as ungoogled-chromium and Brave (which can be configured to minimize data collection and bloat).
In the end, the choice is yours.
First off, if you're concerned about phone privacy, consider a custom OS for your phone that respects privacy such as GrapheneOS.
It's easy to figure out that your device isn't listening to a constant audio stream 24/7, since that would drain battery and send a lot of noticeable data over the network. However, it is entirely possible to listen for certain keywords as you mentioned, and send them encrypted with another seemingly legitimate packet. There's no way to be 100% certain, but it is possible in theory without draining too much battery.
The steps you took are good, making sure that apps don't have any permissions they don't need. Privacy is a spectrum, so it's not "all or nothing". As I mentioned before, if you're seriously concerned about mobile privacy and want a solution, you can get a custom operating system that can remove any privacy invasive elements. GrapheneOS also allows you to disable the camera and microphone system-wide (although this functionality is present on some other Android builds).
If it eases you any, a lot of these advertisements happen to be coincidence and trigger confirmation bias. It could be that those ads happened to show up by coincidence, or that advertisers managed predicted your interests, or that you got tracked by some other means while downloading the movie. The possibilities are nearly endless.
It depends on what you're defending against. Both hackers and surveillance can happen behind the scenes, so while no data loss or noticeable breaches happened, that doesn't mean that nothing happened.
What makes Firefox desirable over Chrome is that it’s not beng developed by massive corporation that gets the majority of its profits selling user data and delivering targeted adverts.
This is a separate issue of being able to trust developers, which is not being covered here. Projects like ungoogled-chromium exist, after all. I will be inspecting the software as a whole, and not any future interference that may happen.
GitHub may be able to restore it, we'll see if support is willing to bend the rules a bit...
Edit: They were able to. The project is still moved to GitLab permanently, though.
Hi! Back in high school, me and a few close friends formed a small hacking group aimed at hacking the school WiFi. We succeeded, and reported the vulnerabilities we found along the way to the school. Our school had a policy where students who managed to hack something would be let off the hook if they reported exactly how they did it. I managed to land a job for the school district as a result of our fiasco. I don't recommend anyone do that, but I managed to get lucky.
Anyways, once we had access to the WiFi we wanted to get around the network wide filter. Proton VPN worked for a while, but quickly got blocked. Dual booting into Tails on school computers didn't work until the 6.0 update. To my knowledge, it still works.
However, for our phones, the thing that worked was changing the DNS. We found out the network wide filter the school boasted so highly about was only a DNS filter that resolved hostnames to a "blocked" page. Find a good PRNS and change your device's DNS to match. If you want a search engine, try to find an unblocked SearXNG instance.
Good luck!
P.S. Don't forget: Tor is portable on Windows devices :)
I was bored, so I compiled a list of 77 of my favorite open-source privacy-focused software. This ranges from Android apps to desktop apps to websites to operating systems. I scraped the programming languages used for each one from their respective repositories, and created a simple scoring system to score each programming language.
Obviously there is some bias, since Kotlin is very popular for Android apps and not much else, and it's not an exhaustive list, so some data might be off, but it was still fun to make! Just wanted to share it with all of you, in case anyone else finds it interesting.
Full ranking
Language scores
C++: 13070
C: 11734
Kotlin: 7195
Java: 6727
JavaScript: 5356
TypeScript: 5002
Python: 4250
Shell: 1903
C#: 1873
Dart: 1872
PHP: 1844
Ruby: 1499
HTML: 1389
Makefile: 990
Go: 975
QML: 955
Pascal: 917
CSS: 888
Clojure: 878
Blade: 832
Crystal: 738
Batchfile: 708
Swift: 577
Emacs Lisp: 556
Svelte: 366
Rust: 351
CMake: 342
Haskell: 326
Lua: 300
Vue: 288
Roff: 268
XSLT: 176
Assembly: 167
NSIS: 130
Objective-C: 128
SCSS: 90
Less: 77
PLpgSQL: 66
Objective-C++: 61
Inno Setup: 59
Meson: 41
WebAssembly: 25
ASL: 22
PowerShell: 21
Rich Text Format: 21
GLSL: 18
Common Lisp: 16
Haml: 14
Scheme: 13
Dockerfile: 12
Perl: 12
AIDL: 11
M4: 7
Mustache: 7
D: 5
MDX: 5
SourcePawn: 2
M: 2
Pug: 2
Lex: 1
EJS: 1
(NOTE: I am NOT looking for criticism on any choices made here)
Original data
TypeScript 62.1%
Svelte 36.6%
Dockerfile 0.4%
JavaScript 0.4%
HTML 0.2%
Shell 0.1%
Other 0.2%
C++ 48.2%
QML 32.3%
Python 8.5%
CMake 5.4%
JavaScript 3.9%
C 1.0%
Other 0.7%
C 37.6%
C++ 35.3%
Python 18.1%
Shell 2.8%
Common Lisp 1.6%
QML 1.3%
Other 3.3%
C# 87.3%
JavaScript 5.7%
HTML 3.2%
Less 1.8%
Python 1.2%
Shell 0.4%
Other 0.4%
Python 99.2%
Other 0.8%
TypeScript 96.3%
JavaScript 2.1%
HTML 1.2%
NSIS 0.4%
C++ 81.7%
C 11.7%
Python 3.2%
CMake 2.0%
Makefile 0.5%
Shell 0.4%
Other 0.5%
Kotlin 99.7%
Other 0.3%
C 98.1%
Makefile 1.5%
Other 0.4%
Shell 83.8%
XSLT 16.0%
PowerShell 0.2%
Emacs Lisp 55.6%
Roff 23.8%
C 16.4%
M4 0.7%
Objective-C 0.6%
C++ 0.5%
Other 2.4%
Ruby 69.2%
JavaScript 17.3%
Vue 6.8%
PLpgSQL 2.9%
Haml 1.4%
HTML 0.9%
Other 1.5%
Clojure 87.8%
Shell 3.9%
CSS 2.3%
HTML 2.2%
Batchfile 2.2%
PowerShell 1.0%
Other 0.6%
PHP 82.7%
JavaScript 15.3%
Less 1.1%
CSS 0.8%
HTML 0.1%
Vue 0.0%
C++ 79.3%
C 17.6%
Assembly 1.6%
Makefile 1.5%
Pascal 91.7%
Inno Setup 5.9%
Batchfile 1.8%
C++ 0.4%
Shell 0.1%
C 0.1%
C++ 71.0%
JavaScript 14.1%
HTML 11.5%
Python 1.1%
CSS 0.8%
CMake 0.7%
Other 0.8%
C# 100.0%
CSS 54.9%
JavaScript 38.1%
HTML 6.5%
Ruby 0.5%
C 95.2%
C++ 2.4%
Python 1.1%
Perl 0.3%
CMake 0.3%
SourcePawn 0.2%
Other 0.5%
C 38.0%
Lua 29.0%
C++ 17.3%
Shell 4.6%
Python 4.3%
Makefile 1.9%
Other 4.9%
C 67.2%
C++ 25.2%
Python 2.8%
Objective-C 1.7%
Assembly 1.4%
D 0.5%
Other 1.2%
Go 97.5%
Shell 1.5%
Dockerfile 0.5%
PowerShell 0.3%
Makefile 0.1%
Python 0.1%
Python 79.2%
C 17.1%
C++ 2.8%
HTML 0.3%
Shell 0.2%
XSLT 0.1%
Other 0.3%
JavaScript 60.5%
C++ 21.5%
HTML 6.6%
CSS 3.8%
C 1.8%
Java 1.7%
Other 4.1%
Batchfile 66.5%
C 18.3%
C++ 10.1%
Shell 5.1%
JavaScript 96.0%
Shell 4.0%
TypeScript 71.4%
JavaScript 22.3%
HTML 1.9%
CSS 1.3%
Java 1.2%
Mustache 0.7%
Other 1.2%
C++ 86.6%
Java 5.5%
Python 1.8%
Makefile 1.6%
XSLT 1.5%
Rich Text Format 1.4%
Other 1.6%
TypeScript 92.1%
JavaScript 5.2%
SCSS 1.5%
MDX 0.5%
Swift 0.4%
CSS 0.1%
Other 0.2%
Java 65.3%
Kotlin 33.1%
Other 1.6%
Kotlin 96.8%
Java 2.8%
AIDL 0.4%
Kotlin 100.0%
Dart 98.7%
Other 1.3%
Kotlin 99.6%
Shell 0.4%
PHP 97.2%
Python 2.5%
Shell 0.3%
Kotlin 100.0%
C 97.0%
Meson 1.2%
Python 1.1%
Other 0.7%
TypeScript 74.0%
Python 24.2%
JavaScript 1.1%
Shell 0.4%
SCSS 0.2%
Dockerfile 0.1%
Python 74.7%
Shell 9.9%
HTML 6.1%
Less 4.8%
JavaScript 2.7%
CSS 0.9%
Other 0.9%
Makefile 87.1%
C++ 11.3%
Shell 1.6%
C 97.3%
Meson 2.3%
Python 0.4%
C++ 45.6%
QML 41.2%
C 5.5%
CMake 2.3%
Python 2.2%
JavaScript 1.9%
Other 1.3%
C 98.4%
Assembly 0.7%
Shell 0.4%
Python 0.2%
Makefile 0.2%
Perl 0.1%
Java 45.4%
C++ 34.7%
Kotlin 19.2%
Other 0.7%
C++ 76.3%
Python 14.6%
C 5.0%
GLSL 1.8%
CMake 1.2%
Objective-C++ 1.0%
Other 0.1%
C++ 52.7%
Python 44.5%
C 1.5%
CMake 0.8%
NSIS 0.2%
Lex 0.1%
Other 0.2%
C++ 90.2%
Python 3.0%
C 2.3%
CMake 1.6%
HTML 0.7%
Rich Text Format 0.7%
Other 1.5%
C 95.5%
Scheme 1.3%
Python 1.1%
C++ 0.7%
Meson 0.6%
Perl 0.4%
Other 0.4%
C++ 87.8%
CMake 5.8%
Shell 3.3%
Python 1.7%
Roff 1.1%
C 0.2%
Other 0.1%
C++ 94.1%
C 1.7%
CMake 1.5%
HTML 1.4%
Python 0.3%
Java 96.0%
HTML 2.1%
Roff 1.9%
C 68.8%
C++ 19.0%
Assembly 10.0%
Shell 1.1%
Makefile 0.5%
Batchfile 0.3%
Other 0.3%
C++ 95.1%
CMake 2.2%
Shell 1.5%
PowerShell 0.6%
Objective-C++ 0.4%
Python 0.1%
Other 0.1%
Kotlin 79.0%
C 14.0%
Java 4.1%
Assembly 2.6%
C++ 0.2%
Ruby 0.1%
Blade 83.2%
JavaScript 5.2%
Vue 4.8%
PHP 4.5%
CSS 2.3%
Rust 35.1%
Swift 26.2%
Kotlin 19.5%
TypeScript 13.2%
C++ 2.8%
Shell 1.8%
Other 1.4%
Java 82.7%
HTML 9.8%
JavaScript 3.6%
CSS 2.8%
Other 1.1%
Java 98.0%
Kotlin 1.9%
Other 0.1%
Haskell 32.6%
Kotlin 32.3%
Swift 26.9%
HTML 2.2%
TypeScript 1.4%
JavaScript 1.1%
Other 3.5%
Dart 88.5%
Kotlin 8.0%
Ruby 2.0%
Swift 0.7%
CMake 0.2%
C++ 0.2%
Other 0.4%
C 94.4%
ASL 2.2%
Makefile 1.0%
C++ 0.7%
Assembly 0.4%
Perl 0.4%
Other 0.9%
Shell 51.5%
Python 25.1%
C 22.2%
Makefile 1.2%
Ruby 78.1%
HTML 8.7%
JavaScript 6.9%
PLpgSQL 3.7%
SCSS 1.2%
C++ 0.7%
Other 0.7%
Java 95.3%
Kotlin 3.9%
AIDL 0.7%
CSS 0.1%
Shell 0.0%
XSLT 0.0%
C++ 71.0%
C 7.5%
Java 6.1%
Swift 3.5%
Objective-C++ 3.1%
Python 2.9%
Other 5.9%
C 62.6%
C++ 18.9%
Objective-C 8.3%
QML 3.1%
Makefile 1.6%
Lua 1.0%
Other 4.5%
C++ 36.7%
QML 17.6%
NSIS 12.4%
JavaScript 10.7%
Shell 9.1%
CMake 4.1%
Other 9.4%
C 54.6%
C++ 34.7%
CMake 6.1%
Objective-C 2.2%
Objective-C++ 1.6%
M 0.2%
Other 0.6%
Java 84.0%
Kotlin 13.5%
HTML 2.5%
JavaScript 68.5%
Vue 17.2%
CSS 11.2%
SCSS 3.0%
EJS 0.1%
Crystal 73.8%
HTML 13.9%
JavaScript 8.2%
CSS 2.6%
Shell 1.1%
Makefile 0.2%
Dockerfile 0.2%
TypeScript 89.7%
HTML 6.5%
SCSS 3.1%
Shell 0.4%
Pug 0.2%
JavaScript 0.1%
Java 84.6%
Kotlin 13.0%
HTML 2.4%
JavaScript 28.1%
C++ 25.7%
HTML 22.3%
C 12.4%
Python 2.8%
JavaScript 28.2%
C++ 25.6%
HTML 22.3%
C 12.4%
Python 2.9%
JavaScript 88.4%
CSS 4.9%
HTML 3.4%
WebAssembly 2.5%
Shell 0.6%
Python 0.1%
Makefile 0.1%
Yeah, true story. Really weird.
Clarification: They reuse the same password (such as "Password") and whenever they create an account they have to add special characters (like "Password1&" if numbers and #@&%$ were required) and when they login they forget which special characters were required by that service, meaning they don't know which special characters to append to their generic password to successfully login. The solution was to screenshot every password requirement for every service and still try to remember which characters were used.
But yes, there is an unrelated frustration where password requirements aren't presented upfront.
Hello! I'm sorry to hear you are experiencing issues switching to GrapheneOS. I understand that can be frustrating, especially with how much of a privacy boost it is compared to iOS. I have used iOS my entire life, so I know it inside and out. When I heard about GrapheneOS over a year ago, I decided that I also wanted to switch. I spent multiple months learning everything I could about GrapheneOS and Android, just to give myself an idea of if I might like it. I even bought a $30 test Android phone to get familiarity with Android.
The thing is, I never expected it to be a one-to-one with iOS, and I expected issues to happen. I learned about potential issues and looked for solutions or forums where I can ask about such problems. I also spent that time (very) slowly convincing my friends to use Signal, but some still use iMessage. It's not an easy switch from iOS! With that said, I have a few things that may help you.
Don't worry! Switching from iOS to any Android is difficult, and will take more than a week. You have to have the mindset of really making it work and making sacrifices. The thing is, even if it doesn't work, its ok to switch to iOS. Make a threat model. If iOS is what you're comfortable with, that's ok! We don't all have to use GrapheneOS
Prepare Make a list of apps you will use once you switch, test out apps on an Android emulator or test phone, and see what works best for you. Not everything has to be open source, and some stuff will require Google. Tinker around and make a map of how you will set things up (apps, profiles, etc.) If you find that there are things you just can't live without, you can either switch back to iOS or have iOS as a secondary phone for those apps.
Security keys If your security keys are causing you problems, consider one that acts over USB-C. If that still doesn't work, ask the GrapheneOS community for help at https://discuss.grapheneos.org/ You can still use iOS as a secondary device for logging into the services that you use security keys for.
Degoogling Because GrapheneOS has such great sandboxing, using sandboxed Google Play is generally safe. It's still degoogled, but you ensure that any compatibility is met by isolating Google related things. You can even put those apps on a separate profile for further isolation. I know, it's uncomfortable to know something Google related is running in the background, but unfortunately that's the state of things. Some other custom ROMs have their own implementation of Google Play (See here)
Contacting others I wasn't able to switch everybody to Signal, and for the ones I couldn't switch you can use a burner phone, MySudo, iOS as a second device, or https://jmp.chat/ to message them. In iOS 18, iPhones will also support RCS, meaning you can contact them with Android without using SMS. Again, this sucks, but you should take care of your own privacy and let them have their own journey.
Banking apps Banking apps have been a common issue on GrapheneOS. Without specifics, I can't comment, but I suggest reaching out to their forum at https://discuss.grapheneos.org/ for help. If that doesn't work, use iOS as a second device for banking.
iOS-specific features Android is not a one-to-one comparison to iOS, but what it makes up for is that any features you want can be quickly added by anyone. However, because the aim of GrapheneOS is a little different, it might be a while before user experience features are added. As for the keyboard, you can replace the default keyboard with ones that suit your needs. HeliBoard is a good one, although I don't know if it has the specific feature you described. These features may be a sacrifice you have to take, unfortunately.
Again, if GrapheneOS simply doesn't work out for you you can always switch back to iOS. Good luck!
Aegis is Android only.
Many people's threat models, like my own, are against mass surveillance. This falls under that category, even if it's being handled responsibly. The issue is people have no way to opt out, and there is a lack of transparency about the use of facial recognition.
Some good, open source TOTP apps to use are Aegis and Ente Auth.