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I'm apple hater but you got to recognize they do better at privacy than Google.

If you care about the NSA, then you better not have any phone. Whatever it's a android, iphone, grapheneos, anything. Israel blowing up pagers is a proof that nothing is impossible to them.

But if you want to say fuck off to the big data harvester like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and so on.. then apple isn't bad at all.

You just got to deal with the usual apple bullshit, no side loading, repairability, thunderbolt charger, no headphone jack, etc.



Shin Bet and friends don't have a magic wand making pagers explode. NSA can't circumvent math. Etc.

This 'but X will get you anyway if they want' or '5$ wrench' is used by alot of people I know to rationalize selling themself out privacy wize.


Your privacy is as strong as your weakest Link. NSA only need one a few vulnerability to be able to monitor what you do, it may be on chip maker, network provider, operating system, compiler, etc..

That's a lost battle, if they want to see what you do, they do and there is nothing one can do but force them legally not to do so.


> But if you want to say fuck off to the big data harvester like Google

They literally sell your traffic to Google.


I am sure there is a name for this fallacy, but being better yet not enough at something where bar for reaching privacy is so high isn't cutting it. The result is the same, sans warm fuzzy feeling not anchored in sad reality of 2024.


We always use "Perfect being enemy of good"


>do better at privacy than Google

so instead of an actual improvement just settle for second least worst? ironically google pixels are 100 times more private than any apple device will ever be because you can securely run your own 100% controlled open source OS such as grapheneos.org which is an actual private as in feature not marketing OS.


A phone has several levels of software and hardware, the OS that the user knows is not in charge of communications, its main role is to interface the user to the computer inside the phone. The phone OS sees the phone communication hardware akin to the way it sees an Ethernet card. The phone communication hardware (named baseband modem) is also under control of the SIM and every time the mobile operator wants to change the behavior of the baseband modem it can through the Sim toolkit.


sadly firmware is a bitch on almost any modern device. good thing it can more or less be isolated from the OS

https://grapheneos.org/faq#baseband-isolation


Believing the software can somehow be separated from the hardware is a lie. They can mitigate at best the the amount of information one can extract but at the end whoever control the hardware can have access to extremely private information.

A gyroscope sensor is able to accurately record what one say close to his phone. It doesn’t even need Android to run he has access to private information.

https://crypto.stanford.edu/gyrophone/files/gyromic.pdf




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