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If you degoogle yourself but then hook into FB whatsapp, isn’t that just defeating a bit of the point?


Sure, "a bit", but I don't think a phone that is entirely broken except for a few open source apps that don't do useful day-to-day things (like order me a Lyft, let me do my banking, pay for stuff at a cash register, navigation, etc.) is all that useful.

My ideal would be to have a base OS and core standard library that I can trust, and then I get to choose what apps I run on top of that. Sometimes I will choose to install an app that doesn't have a great privacy track record, but I will rely on apps like TrackerControl, Blokada, and Bouncer to mitigate my exposure somewhat. It won't be perfect, but we don't live in a perfect world where there are feature-identical, privacy-respecting clones of the mainstream apps. Until that time, I can decide what are acceptable risks to my privacy.

Unfortunately, I don't have that choice right now: either I live with the privacy minefield that is Android (as I do, and try to mitigate privacy leaks as well as possible), or the nanny state that is iOS (which I -- for now -- consider the greater evil).


Perfect is the enemy of good.




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