De-Googling My Phone
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Hey, I've been very quiet about all things related to The Art of Diesel for quite a while, but I've taken a lot of video footage of projects I've been working on. The struggle is always finding time to edit many GB of videos, stringing them together into useful how-to segments. Since I took on a new job, moved to the Cincinnati area, and wound up chairing the Libertarian Party of Warren County, time is tight and I'm spread too thin just like I've always been. I enjoy sharing my projects, though, and will post what I can when I can.
I've done a few projects on my Mercedes diesels and I have footage to edit, but today I'm sharing a video about an important topic for anybody who cares about liberty: Digital Privacy. If you are using a stock Android or iPhone you need to understand that you are being tracked in every way imaginable. Tracking these days includes contact tracing, location, behaviors, recording words, and who knows what else? The problem is that iOS is 100% proprietary and Android has a lot of proprietary software in it where you can't really know what all is being collected. While Android and Apple operating systems do more and more to help with privacy by giving you control over app permissions, there is NOTHING you can do to truly control what the operating system might be doing in the background. Rob Braxman really covers this topic well and you should subscribe to his Odysee channel for a better understanding of the Digital Panopticon we are living in.
Shifting to LineageOS won't give you perfect digital privacy, as your phone company will still track you (it's impossible for them to provide service without doing this to some degree), and you could certainly unwisely install apps that sacrifice your privacy. An important workaround is to stick to open source software available on F-Droid (paying attention, of course, to their own ratings on the software). I believe that going to LineageOS and making sure NOT to install Google Apps is a good 85% solution, because at least you remove yourself from Google's system of collection.
I've been de-Googling phones for a number of years, using operating systems including CopperheadOS, GrapheneOS, LineageOS, and /e/. The de-Googled operating system ROMs available to put onto various Android phones continues to grow. I know people who are now using CalxOS, which runs only on certain Google Pixel phones and appears to be based on CopperheadOS and GrapheneOS.
I recently used /e/ because it included microG, which provides a framework allowing certain apps to function without Google's proprietary software and services. What I don't like about /e/ is that the interface behaves like an iPhone, while I prefer an Android interface. Now there is a version of LineageOS that incorporates microG called LineageOS for microG. That's what I've installed on several OnePlus 6Ts recently. I recorded the process when I flashed my own phone and I'm sharing it with you here:
https://odysee.com/@TheArtOfDiesel:6/OnePlus6TFlash:3
Some useful links that are mentioned in the video follow:
LineageOS for microG
https://lineage.microg.org/
LineageOS
https://lineageos.org/
Fastboot and ADB Download
https://developer.android.com/studio/releases/platform-tools
Setting up phone permissions using the 51-Android Rules file
https://snowdream.github.io/51-android/
MSM Downloader tools
https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/tool-6t-msmdownloadtool-v4-0-59-oos-v9-0-13.3867448/
The cracked international version of the MSM downloader tools
https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/t-mobile-6t-to-international-conversion-without-unlocked-bootloader-sim-unlock.3888307/
XDA updates page
https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/oneplus-6t-global-rom-ota-oxygen-os-repo-of-oxygen-os-builds.3865396/
I hope this is helpful and I hope to spend some more time editing videos and posting some of my diesel and other projects in the near future. Please let me know what you think!