The Panopticon Is Here.

Resistance Is Futile, Puny Earthlings.

  • 1 Post
  • 8 Comments
Joined 27 days ago
Cake day: June 23rd, 2025
  • DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.workstoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•How can you make stock Android as private as possible?
    10·
    11 days ago

    Rethink DNS is both a firewall app, and you can run a VPN at the same time using a wireguard configuration.

    I use a VPN system wide, and for some apps like Fennec or a Torrent app (yes I torrent on my phone lol), I use a different wireguard config for each one of these apps. For the systemwide VPN, its using a server in my country, for individual apps, it goes to switzerland or iceland (So the IP used to check for system updates isn’t correlated to the IP used for everyday browsing, watch youtube videos, or torrenting). I block everything from internet access unless it needs internet to function, like a phone app for example (for VoLTE). Enable “block connections without VPN”.

    Mullvad has the cheapest VPN at €5 Euro per month, and ProtonVPN have some free servers, but free servers have slower speeds.

  • DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.workstoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•IMEI concern grapheneOS
    7·
    21 days ago

    By hiding the IMEI, the provider won’t be able to associate the device with me when I use it solely on public Wi-Fi such as in a café

    I think you’re a little confused. Connecting to Public Wifi (or any wifi), will not reveal IMEI, it does reveal your Wifi MAC Address, and if you have Bluetooth on, it will reveal your Bluetooth MAC Address, but will not reveal your IMEI (unless you have malware on your phone).

    In modern smartphones, including iOS, Android, and especially GrapheneOS, Wifi MAC addresses are spoofed by default, generating a random MAC address for each Wifi network. You can even go to Developer settings of Android to enable randomization for each different session of the same wifi network (or you can “forget” the network and reconnect and, from my testing, it would immediately change the MAC address for that network).

    Although, if you have iOS or Google’s Android, you can’t be sure if the companies themselves are tracking you, but but a privacy Android ROM (like GrapheneOS) with Wifi MAC randomization enabled should be very safe.

    Keep Airplane mode on so it stops connecting to cell towers.

    Though I’m still curious about:

    May I also ask how much information is carried to the second device by using hotspot? By this I meant the phone with IMEI will be able to know my device name, but what else? Will the phone with IMEI also be able to know the device model?

    Your device name and Wifi MAC address is revealed, so change the default “Google Pixel” to something else to hide the fact that it’s a Google Pixel. But, some wifi access points can detect your device model anyways. My Xfinity gateway will show my Phone’s name and what model of phone I have. So I’ll just assume that: Device Name, Device Model, and MAC (which is randomized) is known. Shouldn’t be that much of a privacy risk unless Google Pixels aren’t popular in your area. If there are a lot of Google Pixels around, they can’t prove it was your Google Pixel.

  • DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.workstoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•IMEI concern grapheneOS
    5·
    21 days ago

    Is it a good enough solution for IMEI tracking to use an alternative device to provide a hotspot connection?

    What?

    So you wanna use another phone as a hotspot and connect your GrapheneOS Phone to it?

    I mean, what exactly do you mean by “IMEI Tracking”? Location?

    Well they won’t know the location of your GrapheneOS Phone, but they’ll still know the location of your alternate phone. Not sure what you’re trying to achieve here.