Isolating proprietary games full of trackers

boarim

My current setup is quite simple: just the Owner profile with Google Play apps installed.

I am considering installing some games from the Play Store. I expect them to be full of trackers. Therefore, after having read the user profiles section, I am wondering if I should isolate them in other profiles.

The question is: regarding the strong sandbox provided by GrapheneOS, does it really make sense to isolate from the Owner profile these privacy-harming apps?

If yes, what would be the main inconvenience (e.g. having an additional password to remember for the secondary profile)?

One more thing: I read this similar topic, but unfortunately, there is not much explanation about the practical threat involved by installing everything in the same user profile.

N1b

From my limited understanding, the main privacy threat is that apps in the same profile can

see some things like other apps you installed and data in folders you allow access to
communicate with other apps (with mutual consent, but no user control yet) which allows them to send data through other apps if they don't have internet access themselves.

Regarding inconvenience, changing profiles can be a breeze (shortcut in the quick settings) if you use biometric unlock. Notification forwarding will allow you to not miss anything from another profile. You'll definitely have to set up the new profile from scratch, set up a new VPN user (in case you use a VPN, it's not treated globally across all profiles), and lose access to some settings like WiFi auto off or dev settings.

[deleted]

This is just my personal opinion. I think it pretty much depends on whether you are using Google Play Services or not. I have only ever used one profile with all my FOSS and proprietary apps in it. I strongly believe apps running in a profile without Play Services have much harder job implementing tracking features against a concrete identity also thanks to restrictions that come from upstream AOSP and GrapheneOS hardening. The next big thing to focus on is giving the proprietary apps (or all apart from system apps) an absolutely minimum of permissions to still be able to function without throwing exceptions and use scoped functions to restrict the space they operate in. And lastly to go through the entire Settings item by item and set it up in the most privacy friendly way.