Cellular Carrier Discussion Thread

Aaron

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.

defidawg

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 ?

Kenny33

defidawg

Wouldn’t you need to carry around two devices in that case?

Aaron

defidawg

Great idea. It would disassociate your Graphene device from the wireless phone number. Over WiFi might not be a great user experience.

You could always keep cycling burner SIMs on your Graphene, with a burner voip number. Wouldn't that give similar levels of Privacy?

OpenSource-Ghost

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.

Kenny33

OpenSource-Ghost

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

endth3fed

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.

Kenny33

endth3fed

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.

OpenSource-Ghost

endth3fed

Is it a requirement to use MySudo app? Is it possible to configure Android settings to use MySudo services via SIP?

MetropleX

I've removed a couple of VPN specific replies to keep this topic more on point to the subject. Previous VPN discussion was done around PGPP as the carrier and on topic.

panopticon

I buy an MVNO prepaid sim in person and pay for it via privacy.com with alias info. I ported my legacy phone number over to JMP.chat and take calls through the internet while never using my sim # for any calls or texts. I am switching to Tello soon for $6 a month with 1gb of data.

Kenny33

panopticon

Does the Jmp solution work well for heavy call users? I utilize around 2 hours on calls daily for work and thought their plan was limited to 300 per month.

Also do texts work well on Jmp? I understood it needs some strange syntax added to the phone numbers to work.

But I’d love to explore this solution if it’s workable.

panopticon

Kenny33 I don't use calls very frequently. I have had some people complain about call quality in the beginning but there are many factors one of which is a lot of development so I am unsure if this is still the case. You can always buy more talk time if needed and the price seemed reasonable. I don't think it hard caps you at any time.
I have not had any issue with text. I use the Cheogram app which interfaces with JMP.chat through XMPP. You can set everything up right through the Cheogram app. Over all I am super happy with the setup it seems to be a good medium between mysudo and an actual VoIP provider with all the restrictions and over site they are subject to. Keep in mind I think they only offer service to US and Canada.

Kenny33

panopticon

That’s very useful, thanks. The call quality would be an issue for me given my heavy usage, but perhaps I’ll experiment with it in the future.

For now, it seems like prepaid cards for data + mysudo will have to suffice

OpenSource-Ghost

Google Play Services are required for eSIM management, but they can be removed once eSIM is activated. Does Google get any eSIM info, such as IMSI, or whatever other info that identifies a user? Is it a requirement to have a Google account to activate eSIM?

MetropleX

OpenSource-Ghost in using privileged eSIM management functionality you expose your IMEI to Google. There is no evidence to suggest they scrape it through this but it is something to be aware of.

It is not a requirement to have an account just need to tap Sign In to initialize.

OpenSource-Ghost

Bumping my last response questions!

OpenSource-Ghost

How does AT&T compare to T-Mobile in terms of 5G coverage? Does it still use IPv4? T-Mobile is not an option because of its IPv6 464XLAT/CLAT that doesn't work with Android 13 VPN Lockdown. The issue existed for 2 months without even a hint of official confirmation from Google regarding even acknowledgement of the bug.

droasidas

I'm trying to install Graphene OS and when I try to click "unlock bootloader" when my Pixel 4A is in fastboot mode I get the error message noted in my title.

No idea how to go forward. Any help would be appreciated.

I also noticed in device manager there's an error message and when I try to update the driver it tells me windows is unable to find a driver for this device.

droasidas

The error message being "No Compatible Devices Found"

Hulk

droasidas
This thread is not for GrapheneOS installation support.
Please open a dedicated thread or contact us over an instant messaging platform such as Matrix or Telegram.

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