Worry About 3rd Party Data Collection?

[lars_the_bear]

It is a PITA for sure. I have to set aside a block of time to get 'into the zone'. Gather instructions, various files, etc. It takes me far too long, and makes me nervous too, taking some years off my life with every attempt.

The worst that can happen is that you'll end up throwing your phone in the trash. You'll already have backed up any data you need to keep, since you know it's going to get wiped, whether the installation succeeds or fails. The Samsung S5 you mentioned can be had for about $30, so that wouldn't be a terrible loss, considering the potential gains. It shouldn't really be a source of heartache

But I've found that, for Samsung devices at least, I've done so many that it's no longer a problem. It takes me about an hour, including the two or three times you have to do a complete reset/wipe. I use `heimdall` to flash the custom recovery, and `adb sideload` to push the new OS image. The first time I did it, it took several days.

The manufacturers certainly don't make it easy, but it gets easier every time you do it.

FWIW my favourite Lineage-supprted phones are the Samsung S10e and Note 9. The Note 10 range also supports Lineage, but I'm not going to be using a phone without a headphone jack at my time of life. Neither has a user-replaceable battery, sadly, but there's a shop in my neighbourhood where they'll replace the battery for little more than the cost of the part. These phones have SD slots and great screens. The S5e tablet also takes Lineage relatively easily, using the same procedure as the phones. I've also installed Lineage on a couple of Sony devices, but I haven't done it enough times for it to be easy.

BR, Lars

[lars_the_bear]

Plus EVERY phone sold has a gps chip and imo, the simpler it is the less likely you are in separating the radios inside, meaning your gps is always on. Great if you are actively tracking someone's every move, what the govt does, but terrible if you actually believe in privacy as a God-given right.

I'm not convinced that privacy is a God-given right, but I certainly agree that it's worth trying to preserve.

As for the radios, though -- GPS is only a receiver, so I don't think it would make sense to combine it with other radio-type devices. There are plenty of combined wifi/bluetooth chips, but these technologies operate in much the same way, at similar frequencies. I don't know of any commercially-available chip that combines GPS with anything else although, of course, I don't know what proprietary technologies the cellphone companies have. I'm sure they sell enough units to make it worth producing custom parts, if there seems to be a cost saving in doing so.

But if a GPS is running when you don't want it to be, how could you prove that? A stock Android device won't give you enough access to the hardware to monitor it and, if you install custom firmware, you've changed the test completely. GPS doesn't transmit anything, so you couldn't even use an external radio to check it.

So, although I've heard repeated concerns that GPS preferences are ignored by Google software, I'm not sure how anybody could prove that. Bear in mind that your phone will be able to get an approximate location from the cellular service, and a better location from wifi access points, if you live in a region where Google has already snooped these (as I do). That Google does this isn't a secret -- Google is entirely open about it[1].

So why would Google want or need to fiddle with the GPS behind the user's back, when they've got plenty of other ways to track us? I'm not saying this doesn't happen, only that I don't see there's any way to know for sure.

BR, Lars

[1] https://support.google.com/maps/answer/1725632?hl=en