Can anyone recommend a good tutorial or even book on how to make Android and possibly Apple handsets private?
For android, look into degoogling as well with things like GrapheneOS or LineageOS. Graphene has a lemmy board I just joined (made my account here 5 min ago lol) and they have a very active official matrix room.
Cool. Thank you!
That’s a massive request. My suggestion is to start very small: download a program such as AdAway or DNS66 and use the VPN to draw up all the telemetry and analytic pings home into a black hole of denials.
That takes care of some of the phone-in’s from your apps. It has a minor drain on your battery, but it helps as a first step that nearly anyone can take on Android.
Take time to research alternative services to the proprietary software in your life. You already likely know this, given you’re here! Self host or find a cloud storage provider, run a Baikal server for your contacts, etc.
The privacy focused community is so confederated and siloed that there is no one size fits many solution. Many tools are developed by folks looking for a solution to a problem they are personally facing, and this leads to some-ninety apps or services that do the same or nearly the same thing, but in a different way.
It’s just on you to find your thing. 😐
It’s a big ask to be sure. Thanks so much for the comprehensive answer :)
Depends on what you call private and who you’re trying to protect yourself from. Is the police an adversary in your threat model?
No. Just need to know how truly secure certain apps are like Telegram etc.
Then i strongly recommend you check out F-droid: it is the only place i know of where you can find trustworthy applications (they’re all free software and vetted by the community, and antifeatures are flagged explicitly) and their blog and overall community are a treasure trove of information.
If you’re confident noone is going after your hardware, Telegram is not the worst. But Jabber/XMPP or Matrix would be considered more robust and privacy-friendly, because they don’t rely on a centralized actor, and don’t force you to provide a phone number. They both support end-to-end encryption.
EDIT: If you have other questions, you can ask them directly. I’m afraid there’s no definitive guide of privacy :)
Thanks. By ‘ask directly’ I’m assuming you mean here and not by DM - if not, my apologies. Yes, I started using F-droid some time ago. I had hoped to root my handset , but it seems tricky to do the one I have. I think I heard somewhere that there’s an app (possibly several) that tests your phone for info leakage.
There’s also https://privacyguides.org
Excellent. Thank you!
I’m using eOS and they have an “easy installer” as well as their own backup/synchronization for accessing files on the desktop.
It looks good, but my device is unsupported.
I am not tech-savvy, but if that hardware relies on its own software, I wonder if the Android app Orbot, which routes all app traffic through TOR, I think, would help. Not sure about NetGuard app, but it might help. Both are on FDroid and worth looking up.
Thanks for the tips
