I think that's a good setup. If you must have Facebook Messenger, my advice would be to maybe use a work profile for apps that track you. Compartmentalization is the key word here. Apps like Shelter make it really easy. I have to use WhatsApp and that is an app that is in the "unsafe" profile, aka work profile.
this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2023
0 points (NaN% liked)
Privacy
31718 readers
307 users here now
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.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
This is a very simple question to answer:
- https://www.amiunique.org/fingerprint
- https://fingerprint.com/demo/ - visit this one in a regular tab, private tab, container tab, etc to see if the fingerprint persists.
Hey, i used a fresh version of Tor, Mullvad and on moblie the browser Vanadium. Every time it says I am unique. How do you become "not unique"?
As far as I understand, if you wanted to not be unique you would have to not use any special privacy tools. Use default Chrome installation and Windows 10/11. There will be millions of people using the exact same setup as you.
Ok so that will defeat my goal of Not getting ads.
You're well above average. I'd say pretty good. One thing you didn't say: Are you often logged in into the services like Google, Facebook, YouTube, Discord, ... Because if you are, they can tie everything together with your account. And did you sign up for those services with your phone number? That'd be bad because it's a unique identifier. Regarding the phone it depends on which apps exactly you installed from the Play store. Most have trackers and there are shady apps out there. I also mainly rely on F-Droid and that's the way to do it. Another thing is email. If you use gmail, all your correspondence gets scanned, regardless of what you do at home. And you shouldn't use membership programs for discounts in real life.
Other than that. I think I do more or less the same things you mentioned. Plus I replaced the Android my phone came with.
Firefoxes strict settings are okay but not perfect, have a look at librewolf for an easy solution, or my Arkenfox softening tool to modify arkenfox to be easy to use.
Did you debloat your xiaomi phone already? May help with some things, but of course not much, but
- do you have google play services enabled?
- what keyboard do you use
- what mobile browser
Facebook messenger is cancer as its unencrypted afaik, so they read everything. Poor you.
An adblocking dns is good, do you have android tracking blocklists, to make xiaomi phones usable? But to be fair, samsung is way worse
Try shelter and isolate all these bad apps and disable them when not needed
I hadn't thought about the keyboard! I use SwiftKey (which I now realise is a terrible choice) from way back before I started caring about my privacy. Do you have any good recommendations? The main thing I need is the three word suggestions to have dictionaries for multiple languages. I use Firefox on mobile as well, with pretty much the same settings and uBlock. I'm not sure what you mean by having Google Play services enabled, as I did say I use the store. Is there a way to use it and have the services disabled? Won't that mess with banking apps? Also not sure what you mean by android tracking blocklists, but I think my dns blocks ads and tracking. I also don't get any ads in system apps like settings for example. Tbh, I am a little afraid of debloating as I tried that ages ago on a Sony M5 and after uninstalling the apps, my phone started running insanely hot and slow. I had to put it right next to the air conditioner to be able to use it, reinstalled all the apps and the problem went away :D
Florisboard is great. Internal clipboard function.
NextDNS has presets to block OS tracking, this is different from just Ads. Any DNS with variable blocklists can use these. There is a windows one, but not sure about Xiaomi.
You dont need google services to use Aurorastore. It works currently.
Also try creating a shelter profile and then disabling the play services using adb in the main one with
adb shell
pm uninstall --user 0 APPNAMES
you find commands online.
Google play services spy on everything with privileged permissions (all) as they are system apps. On GrapheneOS you can install them as regular user apps, and they still work.
I recommend Mull from F-droid instead of firefox. Try adding my custom addon collection:
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/collections/17446767/Fenix-Addons/
Florisboard.
Its default settings are not perfect, you can theme it OLED black which is nice, it has an internal clipboard with the action bar for "mark all" "copy" "crop" "paste" "delete last entry" "show history" and even cursors. Its brilliant for privacy as its internal clipboard cant be seen by apps if you disable "sync to system"
It doesnt have autocomplete and after a quick rise and development its very rarely developed anymore. But I dont miss anything, just autocomplete and maybe Sayboars Speech to text would be nice addons
And no, debloating doesnt cause overheating normally