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Cake day: September 15th, 2025
  • splendid9583@kbin.earthtoTechnology@lemmy.zip•Samsung phones embedded with 'unremovable' Israeli spyware
    61·
    3 months ago

    I used to think like this. However, if someone says, “The most expensive phone I can afford is embedded with unremovable Israeli spyware, and there is no operating system that is open-source and receives regular security patches available for it, and I can’t afford to pay for internet access, so I use the platform that only lets me access Facebook”, I’m not sure that there’s much I can do to help them. If someone said, “Can I use a phone that costs less because it’s subsidized by Facebook while being protected from malware and surveillance?” I’d respond with, “The answer is probably ‘no’”. I’m sure that it’s possible to be in a situation where the only choice is to have no internet access at all or to use the internet in a way that makes one vulnerable to surveillance, and I think it’s likely that getting more money is the most reliable cure for that situation (and it might be true that no other cure exists).

    privacyguides.org probably has a target audience of people that are being actively targeted by sophisticated government actors, and displaying information about a measure that is inferior to another measure in every way other than cost would make it more likely that someone would use the inferior measure in an inappropriate situation, and that could cause someone to be in physical danger, so it’s probably best to just not mention any measure unless it might be superior to all other measures in some situation (without considering monetary cost). For people that are subject to less physical danger but more cost restrictions, it’d probably be better to have a separate website. I do think that such a website would probably have less funding available (since privacyguides.org will probably receive funding from the audience that is mostly unencumbered by resource constraints, so any other website will probably receive less funding) and therefore less expertise available, which would be regrettable (since I do have old phones that I’d like to make more secure).

    There was a time when there was no formal recommendation for computing hardware from privacyguides.org at all, so having one at all is an improvement compared to the past. It’s unfortunate that there aren’t two options that meet the documented criteria, but having one is better than having none. For now, the best we can hope for is probably a phone model that meets relevant criteria (or where the only unmet criteria could be met due to new software being made available) becoming more popular, such that its price comes down due to having an economy of scale. Hopefully that will be a phone model not influenced by Google.