Sure. Everyone needs to evaluate who or what they trust based on their own threat model.

Because I trust my VPN more then my ISP. This is a pretty obvious and common answer.

smspool seems like a much simpler / cheaper solution.

I do this as well. Bought one from njal.la for $15/yr

Sadly privacy is inconvenient. That’s the world we live in.

I bought a domain for $15/year that I use in these cases. It has the added benefit of being able to manage it through the simplelogin dashboard.

The investigation did not spotlight the similarly-named Matrix open source communication protocol.

Feel like there are going to be a lot of confused Lemmy users who won’t read more than the title.

Tldr after realizing your a lineage os stan

its always lineageos users that can’t handle the fact their OS isnt very private.

Here is some fun reading for you

This is just not true for a multitude of reasons.

The obvious being that most other custom ROMs are not actually degoogled (ie proprietary blobs, still communicating with google) and/or they try to do it in ways that provide no privacy benefit such as replacing google with MicroG which has the exact same issues (ie privelged access to your phone).

The majority of these custom ROMs break any semblence of their security model (rooting, not locking the bootloader etc) to bring these privacy measures, which makes them almost moot in and of itself.

Also purely focusing on removing yourself from Google (especially while ignoring all of AOSP, and to an extent Android in general, is Google centric) when there are tons of other large data gatherers (many of them with far less recognizable brands) that your probably ignoring is useless.

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If it isn’t divestos or grapheneos the privacy gains over stock are going to be minimal compared to the comparability issues you will face.

The mindset about privacy is just all wrong. It’s not an all or nothing game. Any privacy gain is a net positive to no privacy at all.

To many people conflate privacy with anonymity or try “accomplish” privacy without understanding what they want to be private from and why.

I’d actually rate a proper Lineage OS install of 4 whole Android versions ago to be more private than stock.

Its always the lineageos stans that can’t take the truth.

Would a research paper change your mind?

https://infosec.exchange/@rene_mobile/113431029855652363

According to this table, Google Pixels beat other devices listed there by far. Even Samsung S-series doesn’t look good

What about a security expert?

Overall, LineageOS does not leave a privacy-friendly or truly secure impression

Author says it should work even in airplane mode which is pretty cool.

Instead of naming my all time favorites I’ll name my most recent favorites…

Inter Profile Sharing - FOSS app to share files and text between android profiles. Super useful as a GOS user.

WG-tunnel - A way more feature rich version of the Wireguard app.

No worries. They are both good VPNs. You really can’t go wrong.

The problem is they were bought out by Pango which is not a trustworthy company.

I have used both Mullvad and AirVPN for extended periods of time.

Mullvad is the gold standard. If you don’t need port forwarding and privacy is your biggest concern there is no better choice. Check out their server infrastructure, and tools such as DAITA / Leta / Mullvad browser to see how much they contribute to the privacy community.

Mullvad is also a much better UX. AirVPN Eddie client feels like its stuck in 1998.

Both are good VPNs - Mullvad just happens to be the best. The only real issue, from a privacy perspective, with AirVPN is they refuse to be audited so you are stuck just trusting they do what they say but OTOH they have been around for a long time and never given a reason not to be trusted.

If you do need port forwarding, AirVPN probably has the best implementation of it. They also have customizable DNS on a per device level which is also pretty cool.

Looks like they

• collect “depersonalized” data
• they use hidden pixels for tracking
• allow advertisers to gather info such as your IP address

So they share “depersonalized” data with advertisers.

They user hidden pixels to track you on their website.

And they allow advertisers to collect your IP address to send you personalized ads.