Buy a pixel off marketplace then. You can brag about saving e-waste.

Google isn’t a bad company, just a product of poor regulation. They have amazing engineers and produce valuable hardware and that should be praised.

Its the business side of things which needs massive regulation and an ethics check.

Straight talk or similar services that you can buy in store for cash.

Direct source: https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/act10/7245/2023/en/

Looks to be a pegasus like program, I didn’t see any evidence of ISP’s conducting mass surveillance on users.

Like pegasus, predator software is a commercial surveillance tool. So it will have to be distributed in accordance to EU law, the union the companies country resides in.

Unlikely to be a major threat to average Joe’s, but journalist and politicians beware.

Please be considerate when publishing articles from indirect sources, third party blogs put on the tin foul hat very quickly.

Unless there’s a super hacker or NSA agent in the class that can figure out your password in real time… You should be fine doing that.

GraphineOS sandboxes google services. You can take it a step further and only install sandboxed google services on a work profile or user profile so you can have toggle-able google services, allowing bank access and whatnot.

Fair point. But GPS signal from a submarine is almost impossible considering GPS needs LOS.

LTE has a range about 10miles and 5G is also LOS. So its brings it down to unlikely that an Apple watch could connect to cellular.

Considering this is underwater and radio waves attenuate very quickly in the water, this is very unlikely to produce any valuable tracking as a majority of the packets would get dropped if any make it to the cellular tower at all.

Only real way someone could track this submarine via cellular would be if they used a cell site simulator and downgraded the signal to 2g, which would be possible with Chinese cellular providers… But this would require already knowing where the submarine is and/or having stingrays all over the ocean.

They send BT signal to any apple device and the device uses their GPS/data to forward the location to the find my network.

I use all of them, at once, with searx.

Brother… apple couldn’t find my airtag when it was dropped somewhere in my yard… How would apple find a submarine 5 miles below sea level in a faradayed submarine?

Tails isn’t really designed for daily driving. I’d go for a user friendly distro like Ubuntu if you an on switching from windows.

It is possible to make windows a little more private if you didn’t want to switch. Here’s a pretty good guide in modifying the the iso before installing: https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/create-custom-windows-11-install-disk

Modifying window does help users gain more control and privacy, but windows is proprietary so a person can only do so much. Be careful on what you remove if you GI this route, windows relies on weird apps to function.

Another note, I wouldn’t be afraid of torrenting. The inky person that would care that your getting free movies and such is your ISP, and you can just flip on a VPN to clear their radar.

I’m just saying that collaboration with or association with spooks or glowies isn’t in itself a red flag.

Many privacy and freedom granting software is made by these people.

Take Tor for example, made by the navy to hide information from the public and anonymously attack networks of adversaries… Yet now is the NSA’s biggest obstacle in mass surveillance.

And I’m sure you only use twofish because the NSA backdoored AES when they standardized it.

YouTube ads are served on the same server as the video… So they would have to filter it through one of their servers and block the elements and stream it to you.

So if you’re using them for privacy… you better trust them a lot because they would have equivalent info as google.

Since its for school you’ll want it to be reliable and to work 100% of the time. I’d just get a big brand and not connect it to the internet if you don’t want your data collected.

Other than that you can try to block the telemetry at the DNS level by VPN to your home with a pihole instance or using a private DNS.

If you really don’t wanna use apple or google OS, then best bet is to buy the tablet for the hardware and try to flash a different OS. But then you’ll risk it not working very well or having app compatibility issues.

I disagree. Firefox is fine, but saying chromium is spyware because its primarily maintained by google is like saying android is spyware.

Additionally chromium browsers are arguably more secure than Firefox, and has more advanced sand boxing. So much so that graphine OS used chromium instead of Firefox for their vanadium browser.

Only thing I agree with is not using brave… Cause well… They fishy.

Looks chromium based, maybe look for another chromium with extension support?

Ungoogled version doesn’t have extension support, but I think that extensions are overated anyways because they make you super easy to fingerprint.

Brave is chromium based… But you have to trust brave.

Without a prior email or some sort of identification? I don’t think so.

If you wan anonymous email, use a tor email. If you want a private email, don’t use email.

Checking the router is probably the only way to see if someone is active on your network.

Can anybody hack your computer? No. Most people only know how to run scripts that are known and patched in most operating systems.

There are skilled people who may be able to create an exploit or find a vulnerability in your computer, but they will mostly target businesses or people they know will be worth it to hack, so most likely they won’t bother you.

Generally if your on your own WiFi, having a WPA-2+ personal password is enough, but the more paranoid may have an IDS/IPS on their home network.

If your out and about, I’d personally use a VPN. I don’t like public ones and like to recommend setting one up on your home WiFi instead.

If you think you’ve been hacked… change your passwords and run virus scans. If you still don’t feel safe, backup your data and reinstall your operating system.

Repost bots can help siphon users from reddit and make it easier to transition.

Easily, here’s a resource if you need it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtuAdk4MwWw