Cellular Carrier Discussion Thread
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Kenny33 Exactly correct. The phone is purchased with cash locally so no tie and the sim can be purchased locally with cash as well
Even so, one can't remain anonymous for long. But more importantly and I don't know about you, but I use my phone to do regular person things. Even if I had purchased it with cash (I haven't), my IMEI would become tied to me within a couple days in more ways than one. I have stopped being bothered by it. I keep my phone in Airplane mode 90% of the time and mostly treat it as an emergency device. In fact, I forget the very existence of it for days at a time.
Kryptos I understand that. I also use a prepaid SIM. But why swap them out instead of keeping using the the one you already have? It just makes you stand out like a sore thumb with IMEI whose IMSI changes on a regular basis, thereby attracting unwanted attention. Outside of accidentally misplacing your SIM card I can't think of any good reason to regularly put in a new one.
That makes sense. But I think if you’re outside of targeted surveillance and you use your phone regularly (not in airplane mode most of the time) then there may be benefits to swapping sim.
If I stick to a plan where the carrier has my identity, they can easily use my data from a mass surveillance perspective. If I swap prepaid sims every couple months, the three letter agencies may not have any issue targeting, but I doubt T-Mobile will figure it out.
Whatnoww I think it was a reddit thread where someone complained that they couldn't use Proton VPN and the creator of PGPP replied and confirmed that's the case. PGPP effectively needs the tunnel that a VPN occupies in order to work effectively. Let me know if your experience has been different.
Closed source as opposed to FOSS.
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It's there a guide for activating eSim after installing GOS? I'm stuck.
I have gp sandbox installed, so the Fi app runs fine. Everything I want works pretty well, and now I'm ready to activate the 6a instead of my current 3a. But Fi app running on 6a complains that it can't activate.
Obviously Fi support is not going to be helpful... Where can I look for help?
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Snowmonk perform the following sanity checks for me please:
Ensure that all 3 Sandboxed Play Services apps are installed: GSF, Play Services and Play Store by simply selecting the Play Store listing in the 'Apps' app in the app drawer and tapping install which takes care of the install of all 3 in the right order.
Install Fi after the above (meaning uninstall and reinstall it if done out of this order).
Open Phone and dial
*#*#4636#*#*
and tapping Phone Info and enabling DSDS.Going to SETTINGS>NETWORK & INTERNET and selecting Enable privileged eSIM management.
Then try to activate eSIM in Fi.
Whatnoww As a follow-up to this, I tried using PGPP. Two things:
It doesn't allow you to use a VPN as I mentioned. This is actually stated on their website. In emailing directly with one of the creators, he is of the belief that the relay system they use is actually better than using a VPN because the information is not aggregated in a single place.
PGPP may provide an additional layer of privacy for a typical phone user, but it has some compatibility issues with GrapheneOS. Namely, use of multiple profiles (which is one of the best benefits of GrapheneOS). Because PGPP's "Relay" occupies the VPN tunnel on Android, it needs to be in each profile separately to work. But the app itself is not tied to any particular account, so from what I can tell you would need to install and pay for a separate subscription for each GrapheneOS profile.
In looking at PGPP's privacy policy, it's not great. It basically reads like a privacy policy from every major tech company there is. That is, it states they have a strong commitment to privacy and only collect the information they deem "necessary", but then they use broad statements to justify what "necessary" means. From what I can tell, they collect just as much information as any other carrier or tech company, and you'd have to take them at their word for what they do with it.
Best bet is probably to just try the Librem aweSIM and then use a VPN instead. It likely gives you the same level of privacy at a fundamental level but with a more transparent and reputable name.
I to have been trying to go "completely off grid". While I do nothing illegal nor have any intention to do so, I've taken the challenge to try and get Big Tech (and Big Bro) sealed out as much as possible.
Reality is that the best I have found is to pick a carrier that requires a government warrant to track my information.
Compare this to Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple that are selling every speck of data they can on each of us both to the government, from Federal to Local, as well as advertisers. They will all provide VERY DETAILED location and DNS information on you to authorities WITHOUT A WARRANT.
While they claim "anonymous tracking", reality is an advertiser can tell where your phone spends the night, then look you up via public record, then literally map out your entire life (background checks) and behaviors. There are services that aggregate and present in easy to digest formats to anyone that wants to purchase the data.
Note that all VPN's, if handed a government warrant, will provide information on you.
So unless I'm missing something, best I can do is limit my behavioral information collection to my wireless carrier which still requires a warrant be issued in order to track me. For me that's good enough since that parking ticket in London from 20 years ago likely isn't going to draw Interpol, FBI and NSA effort to get a warrant. And keeps the Matrix from tracking me and selling me another Pixel 6. LOL
I'm new to this privacy game. Set me straight if I'm off. Always up to learn.
I love the sentiment and very much have similar objectives to you.
One note, it does appear that a lot can be gathered without a warrant needed:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/police-mass-surveillance-fog-reveal-tech-tool/
https://www.androidpolice.com/local-police-favorite-surveillance-tool-fog-reveal/
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You are absolutely correct. I've spent some time in a previous role looking at detailed use cases using "anonymous" mobile ad id's. While "anonymous", it's as easy as a company such as Fog Reveal seeing where your MAID spends the night (home), spends the day (work), where it frequents (shops, associates with,...) then searches public records to find who lives at your address, pulling credit reports, background checks, FB/Social media linkages, traffic to your broadband IP, and voila' you have a complete behavioral profile.
While the MAID's are technically bucketed into a minimum pool of 1000 for each demographic slicing (gender, age, income,etc), all you have to do is create a Venn Diagram and they now have a 92% probability of tracking Kenny33 or Aaron or whomever. Aggregating the FB/Twitter/IG data enables them to nail you exactly - check ins at taco tuesdays, crappacino at coffee shop,...
Hardly anonymous and all completely legal.
And to think there are creepy cops in the police station makes me shudder with 1984 flashbacks.
Once we scrape Mobile Ad ID's off our phones, scrub tracking cookies, use VPN's we've gone a long way to blunting the intrusion of Big Tech and Big Bro.
Regarding the IMEI of a Pixel / GrapheneOS device pairing with a carrier,
Could you not just connect a pixel/graphene device to another non registered cellular device's Hotspot thus circumventing any need for a sim card / IMEI Marriage in the first place ?
What's a good VoIP provider that respects privacy? Basically, I'd want my cell carrier to just forward SMS and calls to VoIP number, from which I would call. Data-only eSIM should work great for such cases.
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Mysudo is pretty good, but requires play services to get notifications of calls/texts
If there are options that don’t require play services, I’d love to learn about them
OpenSource-Ghost I have one profile setup with mysudo and had to setup Google Framework and play services but not the play store; with cross-profile communications it works as expected 60% of the time. The non-working times is due to prepaid Mint sim issues I believe. I never use the number supplied with the mint card, don't even know it. The Mysudo account is paid for with a privacy.com card and I pay for the option to conceal my purchases so the point of failure there is privacy.com and whatever device IDs I'm transmitting through my access points. On that vector I use my neighbors wifi a mile away via a Yagi antenna; to repeat what others have said, I have no desire or intention to do anything illegal I just don't think big brother should be able to sell all of my PII just because they can.
If anyone has more advice on randomizing device MACs and other IDs I'm all ears.
I like your setup. Do you think the 40% non working is strictly due to mint?
My understanding is that graphene is quite private over Wi-Fi due to the mac address randomization but any reason you don’t feel comfortable connecting to Wi-Fi?
Perhaps you can try a solution like silent.link instead of mint although you’d need play services for Esim to work.
Is it a requirement to use MySudo app? Is it possible to configure Android settings to use MySudo services via SIP?