What is spying? - Lemmy.world

Sorry to post my shitty neofetch to this community

Google “Only spy the web” is highly inaccurate…they are everywhere. In every website, in your android phone, in your YouTube, in your Google drive, in your email, in your Google maps…

Anyways… I will calm down now. :)

in your android phone

And if you try to revoke their spying access on a rooted stock device, they force a reboot ☹️

Hence GrapheneOS sandboxing the Play Store. It is ironic that Google is the only phone manufacturer that allows for installing a different OS. But I suppose the fact that GrapheneOS has pushed security updates that have made it into stock Android and the fact that most users won’t bother installing an alternative OS on their pixel phones is why they allow such shenanigans.

It is ironic that Google is the only phone manufacturer that allows for installing a different OS.

What do you mean by that? There are definitely other manufacturers that make it easy to unlock the bootloader so you can install other ROMs.

I stand correctted then. Please tell me a few of these other manufacturers!
Motorola has always made it easy. I’ve unlocked and rooted LG phones, although not sure on how easy they make it normally. Oneplus is well known for being open to unlocking. I’ve done it with Samsung too, although you have to be careful with the model, US variants are harder.

I stand very corrected. My apologies for not investigating this further before posting. I suppose i should rephrase my previous comment as:

I find it ironic that Google allows its flagship product to be rooted with an OS dedicated specifically to limiting data harvesting of Pixel users.

Yeah, it does seem counterintuitive, but they have to have some reason for it. If I were to guess it would be to keep goodwill with nerds like us. The way it stands, techies are still recommending Pixels, and that’s good for them.

But whatever reason it is doesn’t have to be much to have a better expected value for them. The amount of people that actually go through the process of changing the ROMs on their phone has to be so abysmally small that it is insignificant to them either way. And then the amount of people that take it the next step further and actually de-Google their phone completely has to be even smaller.