Not noticed it and fuck those websites. Happy to boycott.
phew, feels like I jumped the ship just in time. Installed PostmarketOS on my Fairphone a couple of months ago, and I’m not looking back.
Is there a specific reason you chose PostmarketOS? I’m currently also thinking about ditching Google android.
I feel like it was in the sweet spot for me as I was looking for a “true”(i.e. non-android) linux phone, and I happened to have a FP4, which I bought years ago. I don’t see many other options for this device, other than ubuntu touch. I tried it like a year+ ago, and it was nice, but it lacked userspace drivers for wireguard and while it was officially listed as issue somewhere in github/gitlab/wherever the development was, the development seemed really slow, almost stagnant. And I rely heavily on wireguard in my homelab setup, so that was a deal breaker for me.
You do whatever you want, but out of curiosity: how is that helping with this issue in anyway?
pmOS does not have Google Play nor the Apple equivalent. GOS has the option of having a sandboxed Google Play.Sounds like that’s the point.
Which Fairphone, and how’s it working for you?
I have the FP6 with e/os right now. It works pretty well, but I am against some decisions from Murena (like using OpenAI for voice recognition)
I’m looking forward to switching ROMs when there is more support for the FP6
Fairphone 4. It’s working out decently enough for me. To be clear, some features are still broken (most crucially phone audio, which only works via headset), speakers altogether started working just a couple of months ago in edge branch. Camera kinda works, but it takes just horrible pictures. Broken if you ask me. I like the “feel” i have with it, it no more feels like I’m carrying a spying device in my pocket, but a computer instead. There are drawbacks, like I have to do my banking old school, visiting the bank site via browser, but they are worth it for me. My phone screen time has definitely shortened. It’s more quiet now.
How is it working for you so far? Thought about doing that as well.
I’ll paste my other response:
Fairphone 4. It’s working out decently enough for me. To be clear, some features are still broken (most crucially phonecall audio, which only works via headset), speakers altogether started working just a couple of months ago in edge branch. Camera kinda works, but it takes just horrible pictures. Broken if you ask me. I like the “feel” i have with it, it no more feels like I’m carrying a spying device in my pocket, but a computer instead. There are drawbacks, like I have to do my banking old school, visiting the bank site via browser, but they are worth it for me. My phone screen time has definitely shortened. It’s more quiet now.
edit: and you can do cool stuff with it, with root access by default! I have signal-cli running as a systemd service, which connects to my matrix signal bridge :)
edit2: funny story about the mentioned signal-cli. I had to put the phone in the fridge, because otherwise while compiling it (had to be compiled, no packages available) hit the critical temp threshold and shut down. :D Felt kinda funny. 2026, phones compiling in the fridge.
Choosing not to buy one now isn’t going to help anything at all.
Google reducing traffic for websites worldwide.
Last bit of traffic they still get from humans instead of AI
Can we trust that isn’t a campaign to promote Google? What are these websites? Why aren’t they blocking an iPhone? Can any of that be replicated or is this just a Google campaign to create fear and doubt
Because the iPhone has their own spyware to prove you’re a
productuser.
https://support.google.com/recaptcha/answer/16609652?hl=en
https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-to-enable-private-access-tokens-in-ios-16-and-stop-seeing-captchas/Interesting. Definitely turning that off. (As if it actually turns off)
If you turn it off, you’ll have to do the captchas manually.
I just do them wrong, after a few tries it lets me through
Yeah I’m okay with that.
GrapheneOS user here! Not sure about websites but there are certain apps that don’t work properly without Google Play Services, but Graphene’s app store has a sandboxed version of it, so I just installed that and revoked all it’s permissions. Then if an app needs it, I just turn on the relevant permission, do the thing and then turn permissions off again. It’s a bit of a pain at first but I’m used to it now.
Note that some apps will say that they won’t work without GPS, but actually will if you give it a try.
Man, I want a phone with physical kill switches for things like Wifi, GPS, Bluetooth, because a lot of things seem to detect when these things are turned ‘off’ by software. Wonder how they’d react if in software, GPS is enabled, but the actual hardware is not powered at all
pine phone
They most likely won’t work. Just speculation, but I would imagine most software that “needs” information like GPS don’t care that its on or off, they care that they try to pull data and there is none.
some of them are now straight up refusing to run without the play store.
Then they don’t deserve your business
I’m a grapheneOS user and I don’t have any google services installed. I havecyetvto hit any major issues with any apps or websites I use. Lucky, maybe?
The main ones for me are the RBC app, Skip the Dishes and Communauto. But I think those might all be Canadian?
I’d say making a 2nd user for the apps that need Play Services (like banking and Uber/Lyft) is the move. This only allows Play Services to run when the 2nd user is on and also fully seperates it from the main user!
Oh yeah that’s something I’ve been meaning to look into!
Its basically forced by Google. I mean who wouldn’t force it after someone deliberately removes your government sanctioned spyware. See if people stopped calling it google or Apple and just USA spyware with backdoor to your lives it would be better at getting to the privacy issues. I mean the NSA already proved this is a fact.
Haven’t encountered this yet, has it been let loose in the wild?
Good point, this would have to work on iPhones too and people without a phone would just not be able to use those websites at all.
I just loaded a bunch of recaptcha on my GrapheneOS phone. So, I dunno what this is all about.
Yeah exactly. Millions of websites? Which ones? Though I don’t see how this would benefit google
well, I guess i will stop using those websites from my /e/os fairphone
And nothing of value was lost. I’m over social media, over commercial apps, and maybe I’m over having a mobile phone, too.
That would make the two of us. My Fairphone 3+ is still kicking well with /e/OS.
What they are doing is way worse tban what you understood.
These QR codes will show on your Desktop PC and you will need an Android phone or an iOS device with a logged in Google QR code app to get past it.
I wouldn’t scan shit from a website. Random QR codes are a security risk. Just won’t visit that website.
That’s why you have to use the special google app that will protect you from all these dangers*
*and also collect all your data, sell it to advertisers and forward it to US surveillance agencies (for your own protection of course).
Sad thing is, that argument works against so many ppl. “I can trust this app. It’s from Google!”
We(*) are tearing down personal computing. Brick by brick. The very idea of controling our own devs is getting lost. Replacing with Big Tech Feudalism.
(*) Not most of us here. But in the whole pop.
I am in no way condoning Google’s behavior, nor am I trying to normalize it. With that out of the way: maybe running Android Studio with an AVD might be a decent workaround. For now…
Is it bad I use this for steam login? I thought that was secure …
Guess I’m not going to Youtube, then.
I see a future where we have our mandated government ID shitphone for banking, corpo and government suchn’shit, and the laptop we access Anna’s, Yggdrasil and TOR with.
and the days go by!
Not exactly same as it ever was, but seems kinda 2007 to me. I doubt any Lemmy instance or i2p site will enforce Google’s QRcode spy-proxy.
It’s not 2007. Devices are everywhere now, smartphones, TV’s etc. The social dimension (social pressure) and implications are very different now. Their power increases, amount of people caught in the loop is immense now. 2007 was all still fun and games.
Undoubtedly, and more still will be as corporate greed turns the internet into pay-per-view TV. We can’t help that.
Make your decision for yourself for what to do with your connections and your own devices. You are in control of at least that, if nothing else.
My current GraphineOS phone will probably be my last smartphone. I’ll be moving to a dumb phone and a data hotspot connected to some type of cyberdeck. Will have that thing locked down, blocking known abusive companies like Google. Honestly could care less about using any service that touches them.
so they are not only tracking you, but they are trying to reconnect your records across multiple devices.
And through the VPN
Ayup that has been the holy grail of big tech.
They are most of the way there today. Make Identity Resolution inescapable. Bing bang boom.
It is more than just phones and lappys too. It’s everything. That smart TV. That fitness watch. That automobile. That streaming music service. The ebook reader you got as a birthday gift.
Your behavior across every single device is data gold. This is today’s reality.
Yep, data gold to sell to data brokers and investors so they can sell you shit that you don’t need and can’t even afford.
That would only make me install Graphene even harder if I wasn’t already writing from a phone with it
Hopefully this will push Linux Mobile development so that we are no longer completely bound to Android or iOS
This. Time to stand up to Google and completely boycott the surveillance tech that the US is deploying.
So what’s your plan? Using your fully-googled device instead of using a slightly-googled phone with Play Services?
They should be fined so hard for this shit.
A fine is brushed off in a quarter. They should be forced to split into seperate companies.
What you said and my comment response to the person we both responded to
And forced to open-source their OS’es. And have to make their communities owned by the people instead of corpos. We are all beyond pissed and done with their shit. Everyone get more people on board into the movement daily to be focused on getting things done together!! Keep each other in the fight with online and in-person communities
Every company that uses these captcha service should also be fined so hard. This isnt just google here.
And every company that is relying on gsm or the apple pendant to verify anything.
I’m not a security guy, what is the problem that this is supposed to be fixing? Like I guess you wouldn’t be able to use a virtuallised os to visit your banking website? Like I understand if you work for a bank you should only be able to access some things from specific computers, but normal people?
The benefit is for Google to make more profits if people are locked into their “ecosystem” without competition driving the prices down.
It’s intended to be a successor to the current reCAPTCHA, sold as harder to spoof than current picture-based versions. Now, almost from its start, CAPTCHA existed to train AI vision models. So Google basically painted themselves into a corner using free labor to train models good enough to recognize images, now they are switching to device signals.
That said, they’re going to have to provide a compatibility layer for iOS which AFAIK doesn’t come with Google Play Services right now. So I have some faith in the smart folks who make these de-shittified OSes working something out via microG or the like.
iOS has their own attestation/anti-tamper api similar to google’s integrity api so that’s going to be used instead. the only difference is that on iOS you’ll need to download extra software specifically for this.
graphene devs said you can do it with their sandboxed version of gms but as far as i know that still involves having an account and handing over all your personal info to google.
They’re claiming it security authentication.
Realistically, it’s keeping people in their walled garden.
You can use a web browser on a Linux computer and get right through, this change is to force people to only run latest generation google products.
This would also block people from using real google phones over a certain age where they cannot upgrade the OS anymore.
Realistically, it’s keeping people in their walled garden.
I felt for a long time, “trusted computing” is such a doublespeak term. It gets avg ppl to think “Oh ofc i want to trust my device! Who wouldn’t want that?”
Ofc what it really does, is gives BigTech the final control over everybody’s dev.
It started out promising. Keep malicious things from changing your firmware or disk without permission. But the tools were never open enough to let you do it. So it only became trusted for those who paid into it.
To anyone not switching because of this-- in my experience this is something I can work around. On most websites my captchas still work. I have had a few that dont work, and I just close the website and move on. It hasn’t happened on any websites that are very important for me to visit. Usually its a store and they really me to install their stupid app. Nope.
I guess many ppl don’t even have an important website
So i just checked back a day later after posting this and it blew up more than i expected. I’ve gotten some comments suggesting its not really preventing GrapheneOS from being usable, so this might need more context. Do your own research and testing on this one for sure, as with most things. Sorry for not answering comments, quite busy right now.
I mean when you’re paying $260 to $300+ for even a used Pixel (8 is the oldest one supported till 2029 I think), that can be a hell of an investment to make if the thing is nerfed from alternate OSs.
Yep. Sunk Cost Fallacy.
Exactly why i posted this, i figured i was probably not the only one wanting to protect my privacy in this age of surveillance nightmare.
Lmao, will this include basic degoogled lineage? I bet it does.
i havent noticed anything? except youtube being slow as always i supposr (/e/os user)
Blocking .js might do the trick…
YouTube is slow because a .js script that put a 5 sec artificial delay in time for using adblockers on the site.
Yt implemented it a while back.
You can still go graphene and isolate play services in a secondary profile.
For a better future: Organisations and services that structure themselves to require third party services need to take contractual responsibility for the actions in their fulfillment supply chain, just as an online retailer takes responsibility for delivery agents. Google play services harvesting needs to be reflected in the privacy policy of every company that doesn’t provide alternative access.
Wonder what will happen if we all start making data protection complaints about enforced non contractual third party data harvesting?
I installed graphene a month or two ago and reluctantly had to install google play for a thing or two. How do the prophiles work?
Under system you can add secondary profiles. You can deni them access to text…not sure if the profile can see your phone number.
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/9253-how-do-you-set-up-your-profiles
You can still go graphene and isolate play services in a secondary profile.
How does that help? Google gets your IP and location. Then they can use the IP to identify the connections in the other profile.
