Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Do you think using GrapheneOS is useless if you plan on installing proprietary apps anyway? (midwest.social)

submitted 3 months ago by clark@midwest.social to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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Curious what people think.

Do you think using the GrapheneOS operative system is useless if the user plans to/needs to install Play Store apps anyway?

I think I'm not alone in feeling this way, but sometimes I feel a sense of imposter syndrome because I'm not perfectly private and am dependent on some Play Store apps. This has caused me to question if the transition to GOS is meaningful at all.

Feel free to share your opinion. Cheers! ...posted from my GrapheneOS Pixel.

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[–] Lemongrab@lemmy.one 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

My point was that regardless of what apps you use, much of googles proprietary code is retained which increases attack surface and could be spyware. The website was just a neat overview comparison between ROMs. DivestOS has details on what it removes (and prob why it removes it). I am not saying that lineage is a bad ROM, just that there is more degoogling possible. DivestOS is a soft-fork of lineage that goes much further than it in an effort to deblob and harden Android. Security often can come at the cost of some usability.

Edit:
An example of a real disadvantage of lineage regardless of what apps you use is what webview it uses. Its webview is (likely) unhardened for Security and therefore poses some risk to the user if used in an attack. Webview provider cannot be changed without root.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Lineage OS doesn't ship with Google proprietary code. There are ways to install GSF but that would turn it into Google Android.

It certainly doesn't encourage as much proprietary software as Graphene os

[–] Lemongrab@lemmy.one 1 points 3 months ago

I may have been incorrect, but I was pretty sure the deblobbing is why DivestOS doesn't support some of Android's features (along side the greater reason of security/privacy). Lineage, like any ROM, depends on binary blobs. DivestOS (and GOS) more thoroughly deblob than Lineage, which I think is a quite important metric when considering a ROM.

Blobs removed by DivestOS: https://codeberg.org/divested-mobile/divestos-build/src/branch/master/Scripts/Common/Deblob.sh