Laughs in Graphene
Not a day goes by that I don’t regret installing that on my phone.
This… Except for contactless payment.
I used graphene for a month. It was lovely. Even things like banking apps worked.
I don’t care about absolute privacy, but I do care about controlling my privacy. Grapheme gave me that.I had only 1 issue.
Contactless payment.
It’s extremely convenient to me, from public transport to groceries. I just bop my phone.The fact that Google has that locked down surely violates some EU laws. But I’m sure they wave away the laws because of “financial security” or some other bullshit.
As if bank card NFC/contactless doesn’t suffer exactly the same issues.
I looked into some “graphene contactless payment” type systems or workarounds, and I couldn’t find anything that would fill the gap.Try Curve Pay. Just learned about it yesterday. I added my credit card and it just works. Couldn’t be happier.
Looks awesome, but unfortunately seems to only be for the UK and EU. I wish the US market would get something similar.
Unfortunately the reviews on Trustpilot and posts on Reddit make it painfully obvious that their customer service is basically nonexistent. Combined with the typical random account-closing most fintechs are known for, this is not a reliable option.
Looking at this comparison, iCard might be an option if you desperately need a way to use NFC payments on your phone. Reviews are good, but it appears to be a prepaid system. Lots of fees to get lost in, too.
But old school might be just fine, too. I just realized my card does fit into my phone case!
I’m always nervous about fintech companies. Maybe it’s time to get over that and give curve pay a spin.
The cashback seems nice, considering a lot of shops I use are on there.Do you trust them? The Curve sub is full of people complaining about fraudulent transactions. Kinda makes me afraid of unlocking my card lol.
I haven’t really put much effort into researching before I downloaded the app. What do you mean ‘fraudulent transactions’?
Worst case scenario; I’ll have to request a new credit card. Not too much of a hassle in my mind.
This may seem like a silly solution but maybe pop your debit card inside your phone case. It should bop through it.
Yup, true.
But contactless via a phone can have no limit.
Adding a debit card to phone case means the upper limit is £100. Which is actually fine, and is the limit I have normally set for phone contactless. But I can instantly remove that limit via my banking app.And the phone needs to be unlocked to make a payment.
Do if I lose my phone anyone can charge £100 to the debit card.Yeah, all fair points. I do love the convenience of using my phone to pay too in fairness.
I hear so many people praise paying with their phones, and there I am, so happy that I can leave my phone at home when shopping. Each to their own I guess.
Everyone has different preferences.
My separate debit card and transport card won’t discharge or just stop working as likely as a phone. It also won’t be suddenly affected by bugs, nor will it get slower. Nor do I get Google also tracking every single payment as well.
The only disadvantage is compatibility. So many things, and now even some shops use contactless-only terminals, while I got contactless or magnetic payments blocked. Only chip + PIN.
But anyway, the shop that had to downgrade to contactless only due to increased fees on regular old terminal also started asking people to pay in cash instead, again, due to the fees.
"The fact that Google has that locked down surely violates some EU laws. But I’m sure they wave away the laws because of “financial security” or some other bullshit. "
I don’t know as much as I’d like to about the regulatory side of this, but I know that Google and other big tech have done a masterful job of proactively building themselves into systems such that taking action against them is difficult.
I think that’s part of why the US antitrust case against Microsoft a few decades ago fizzled out into nothing — even though Microsoft was deemed to have been a monopolist, the big question was how do we remedy that in a way that isn’t going to be harmful? The consensus on this amongst people who I respect is that the results of the Microsoft case was woefully insufficient and something that helped to lay the foundations of the big tech dominance that we see today.
That is literally the only thing keeping me from installing Graphene on my phone.
I was hesitating due to this as well, until I realized that my payments are something I want google to have data on least of all. So I got a debit card and turns out it is no inconvenience at all.
I use a smart watch for contact less payments ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
i just use a debit card lol
It’s not necessarily a solution, but my Garmin watch can still hold some of my cards, so I don’t need the NFC payment on my phone to duplicate that functionality. Do you wear or carry any other devices that can stand-in?
No.
I tried a smart watch for a week or so, and hated wearing it.
Hadn’t worn a watch in 20 years, and it felt very strangeFair enough. I was in that camp for a decade or more myself. I hope you find a solution!
So you regret it every day? GOS is amazing in my opinion. What’s your gripe with it?
Double negatives are hard. I love Graphene.
I mean, the way I read it is “not a day goes by on which I am not regretting doing this”. So, every day you are regretting it 🤔
For real, I was puzzled. Like damn, this dude absolutely hates Graphene! I wonder why…
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Why? Curious.
What I’m curious is what kind of ball are you shaped like?
A golf ball? With divots all over your skin? A basketball? Just round? A baseball? With stitches all over your skin like later years Chucky? A football? Are you Stewie Griffen? Testicles? Wait, are you saying your whole body is one big testicle? Oh my god, the Iron Shiek wasn’t speaking broken english! He was just talking about you!!! “I hit him right in the ball this big!”
Lol! ❤️ run on rants.
And I used to be quite overweight with a large gut. My kids used to say I was 19 months pregnant. The weight is gone but I kept the name.
I installed GrapheneOS for the security and lack of Google. I didn’t know it was a very nice stock Android without any crap. I love it.
Main things holding me back are the apps I already paid for on Google Play, and tap to pay.
Tap to pay is not there. But you can install the Play Store and install all your paid applications, that’s what I did.
You can sandbox play store apps right?
Everything is sandboxed but I don’t have all the details. You don’t actively turn any sandbox on or off, it’s always there IIRC.
Even the play store is sandboxed. Those stupid games covered in ads, no where near as bad when the app never has a network connection or access to any files outside its directory.
I guess I’ll need to get one of those little holsters that can hold a credit card.
I’m not trying to convince you but I was paying for everything with my phone, it was the most important feature. After installing GrapheneOS, i got control back and piece of mind, and I dont miss tap to pay.
I believe /e/OS supports a broader range of devices, and it’s also pretty great in my experience. The focus is on getting rid of google (replacing all services with MicroG and nextcloud integration) and blocking trackers while providing a smooth user experience, so it’s security features are not as over the top as Graphene. It’s still a huge freaking improvement over stock Android though, and I find it to be a joy to use.
On devices supported by the online installer it can be up an running in like 30 minutes, no technical skills required. :)
Thanks for highlighting this. I might try it out on my OP7Pro.
Does this work with multiple device accounts? Work requires my phone to have a personal/work account to be able to access applications like teams, and it’s the only thing keeping me from swapping
In the sense of multiple users in Android settings? That works, it can be enabled in settings -> system -> multiple users. I haven’t tested it though, as I don’t have any need for that.
I use Microsoft Authenticator and Microsoft Outlook for work, and both work flawlessly with /e/OS. Thankfully I have not had any reason to test Teams, but I’m pretty sure that would work as well.
I can confirm that this works with LineageOS using something like Insular, and I have tested it.
so jealous, wish it or lineage os worked on any of my phones
Does this induce a current?
Google: Laughs in “Everybody else you communicate with who has that shit enabled”
Sadly true in any situation that requires talking to anyone else.
Is it just me or does it seem slightly sus that GrapheneOS is only available for Google hardware…
There are many technical reasons why: https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices
Every Android phone (besides Pixel) fails to meet the high technical requirements of the project.
Sounds like they’re intentionally setting the barriers to entry too high for anyone other than Google…
Ok. Which ones, and why?
Edit: I can see the 5 and 7 year support, but what about the rest of the list?
Mainly just that one mean it will never be available on any other hardware…
All the others seem like nice to haves rather than requirements to me(the first one is half required , half nice to have “…including full hardware security functionality”), but I guess I might change my mind when I get around to building a Linux phone when I have time to do that when I’m dead… 😅
Building a linux phone: do you mean from scratch, or just installing one of the Linux phone OS’s that already exist?
I’ve been following Ubuntu Touch for several years now and, while they have made a lot of progress, its main hurdles have the same thing in common: mobile hardware is incredibly locked down. For example, Ubuntu Touch uses proprietary Android drivers for many low level functions. Even then, there’s some features that aren’t stable across all devices, like VOLTE.
It sucks, I really want to use Ubuntu Touch (or any of the Linux alternatives) but I can’t make phone calls or text in the US without VOLTE support. There are a few phones that support VOLTE, but the feature is either in beta, the phone is expensive, or the phone is not sold in the US.
Anyways bringing that back to Graphene: In my case, I’m using this as a stopgap until Linux phones take off (assuming they ever do). For now I guess the best thing is to just be skeptic, keep things minimal, and bloat-free.
My experience with Gemini:
Hey Google, set a timer for 5 minutes.
Gemini: I’m sorry, I don’t understand.
WTF is the point of it then?
Imagine taking away the only useful feature of a voice assistant 💀
My recent experience with my phone is I tell it to set a 5 minute timer and it sets one in the fucking Google search browser, and if I page away I lose the timer.
I just use the timer on my microwave, I suppose the kitchen is the most likely place you’d want a timer. Unless you were using 5 minute epoxy.
When I first got into Android (I miss my Nexus 6 T.T ), it felt like I could do so much more with my phone than I can now. I had so much cool automation shit that leveraged stuff like Google assistant voice commands, but now it’s shit on so many levels. It goes beyond the user facing side of things; I used to use the app Tasker for a lot of the automation stuff, and over the years, it seems like the dev has been climbing an uphill battle against Google gating off functionality, and generally making things opaque and difficult for developers.
Your chats are saved in your account for up to 72 hours, whether Gemini Apps Activity is on or off.
https://myactivity.google.com/product/gemini
I wonder how long before AI services are added to ad blockers and VPN privacy controls.
up to 72 hours
(then we permanently add them to our private fingerprint folder based on any google-related link or api you’ve ever interacted with)
The time limits on their spyware might as well be ignored.
Bwahahahah
I locked that shit out fucking day one. Fuck Gemini.
Narrator: And users did not in fact, take action.
It’ll just be one more thing for them to complain and do nothing about. That is all.
Most people wont even notice. My non techy friends love their new Pixel phones and all the AI assistance.
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I’m still praying for TempleOS mobile version.
You really think that the holy OS can even fit in such a small, restrictive device as a cellphone? Of course not! It needs room to truly achieve transcendence.
God does not wish HolyC to compile to lowly ARM architectures
FairPhone can run Postmarket OS, eOS, iodeos, calyxos and lineageos.
Some have longer support than others. Also you can buy separate parts for their phones and they are modular.
Yes but do they support the digital national ID and SSO apps that are (only) avaliable for android and apple? Until they do, a lot of users are going to be locked into those two big OS vendors. 😞
If you don’t need any of that¸ you’re good!
Enjoy your new linux phone!
I don’t get it.
you’re in a thread discussing the finer points of privacy concerns about a corporation snooping on your apps and your only example of a barrier to not use a privacy focused product is…your requirement for government backdoors and spyware?
also SSO works just fine on eOS. unless you’re talking about googles MFA. at that point why are you even concerned about privacy?
eOS is Android
eOS is forked AOSP and has all Google “contributions” removed.
so yes. it’s Android.
and so, OP’s SSO problems are null since eOS has no issue running it due to it just being android under the hood.
that apk doesn’t install on arm Linux. Comparing eOS to Postmarket is apples to oranges. eOS is still chained by the buttcheeks to AOSP and Android.
AOSP may not contain google services, but you’re still at their mercy. No Google = No AOSP, or whenever they feel like it. Tomorrow, maybe.
The digital national ID is not corporate or government snooping. If you believe it is, I don’t think this conversation can continue. What it is, is what’s needed to log into your doctors system to schedule an appointment, or the schools system to read updates about your kids, or to log into your online banking. All of that, and more, in my country, is using the same ID system, which won’t work on a rooted android phone (at least, I haven’t been able to make it work for the past 3-4 major versions).
you must have a lot of trust in your government.
giving examples of what it’s used for doesn’t make it any better that you’re forced to install software on your personal device by your government for simply existing and is an invasion of privacy.
in my country my government wanted to use facial recognition for online transactions that were previously accessible via government IDs. it was found that the facial recognition software was provided by a corporate identity provider that was then selling that same data to local police that then tracked people through local government surveillance.
when it comes to technology, I have zero faith in every government in the world to have my best interests in mind. they are all guilty of either being complicit in eroding civil rights or negligent in upholding the protections built for civil liberties.
Yes, but i have a Nothing Phone (1). I should check the other alternatives, but afaik lineageos does not support my phone.
The Mindset:
Lineage doesn’t support my phoneI bought a phone that isn’t supported by Lineage
👌👌💯
I guarantee their device wiki existed before you bought your phone.
LineageOS
Doesnt Apple also do this with Siri and basically every app unless the user untoggles it?
Yes, for the amount of hate Google gets… Which I think it is fair to be critical of any product that compromises privacy… I recently tried helping my mom clean up her iPhone, and seriously like 100x worse. Almost everything you do on Apple demands you have another Apple device. One of the worst experiences I’ve ever dealt with.
Isn’t there some form of sampling bias here though? The kind of people who generally would care about these things likely also care about interoperability and would be on Android. I wouldn’t be surprised if iPhone users simply don’t care if Apple demands them to do anything.
Kinda sounds like you just don’t know how to use an iPhone.
Absolutely not the case… I sense a bad case of Stockholm syndrome.
Because i think cleaning up an iPhone is easy?
Yes and you have to untoggle it for each and every app individually
Except Apple has better marketing, and is primarily marketed for those who’re excited for every tech “innovation”.
Anyone know if this is happening outside the US and if it is whether it’s happening inside the EU?
Yeah, this seems like an easy lawsuit in the EU tbh
I’m in the UK and today I got asked whether I wanted to leave this on or not - it just notified me and asked me to confirm my consent.
So I think this article’s headline is slightly misleading - Google is actively informing users and asking them to confirm their consent.
That’s good. I haven’t had anything though, hopefully saved by the EU.
I live in Finland using Android on a Nokia and I can switch Gemini off completely and choose to use the old Google Assistant instead. It did initially appear out of nowhere when they patched it in, but I could immediately turn it off with the same prompt that the other guy also got.
If it’s unavoidable it seems to be an US only thing atm.
Opt-out by default in the EU I’m fairly sure.
You can check here: https://myactivity.google.com/product/gemini
I switched Gemini language to an unsupported language.
I just removed gemini from my phone.
me too and then it somehow popped up in messages which I had to “turn off” separately. removing AI from an Android phone is an illusion.
Make your next phone a Pixel and load GrapheneOS onto it. Problem solved.
Pixel stopped publishing device trees since a few weeks ago, it will be significantly more difficult for the devs now to continue maintaining it.
I would already do it now if not for banking apps
Is there a petition for antitrust charges against Google somewhere? I’m over the duopoly. Both options suck.
I’m not signed into a Google account on my phone, am I safe?
Go to Settings --> Apps
Find “Gemini” and tap into the app page and tap disable
If you can’t find Gemini, you phone probably didn’t get the Google Play System Update yet, so check the app list when you update next time. (Or you can refuse to update, but outdated android comes with security risks)
Mine is already disable for some reason. Maybe I did that a while ago and forgot about it.
Mine apparently didn’t, but it’s an older Samsung. Like, micro-USB era. I’d be surprised if Google ever autoinstalls Gemini because of the age.
Gemini: okay! i’m disabled 🤞😉🤞
ADB tools —> remove google services and other spyware apps —> oops, you bricked your phone
I just went into my settings after reading this article (and getting a bit frustrated that it was a wall of text with no clear instructions right up front).
I did a search in settings for “gemini” and found the Gemini settings. There’s no clear ‘off’ switch. But there’s is an option to switch back to Google Assistant. So I did that. And not when I search for Gemini in settings it urges me to enable Gemini.
I’m taking that as a good sign that I’ve disabled it permanently. Thought I’d post this info in case it helps someone else. Or so if I’m incorrect somebody else can correct me.
I mean there were no instructions up front because literally Google is refusing to give them, basically.
No more choice just the company force feeding the user and saying it’s good for them.Nowhere in the email or any of the Support pages did Google say how to remove all Gemini integrations from my phone.
I then emailed Google PR and… I asked if someone could provide actionable guidance for my readers who want to ensure Gemini integrations are completely disabled. Instead of answering the question, the person responding to my email wrote, in part: “This update is good for users: they can now use Gemini to complete daily tasks on their mobile devices like send messages, initiate phone calls, and set timers while Gemini Apps Activity is turned off. With Gemini Apps Activity turned off, their Gemini chats are not being reviewed or used to improve our AI models.”Literally that reads like you can’t turn it off and they just scrape less of your data on a technicality.
I just spent half an hour yesterday uninstalling all apps, registry entries and in-program options for Copilot in Windows and MS Office… but I still can’t get rid of the Copilot button in Outlook. Searching for answers I ended up at the Microsoft support forums and clicked a link to office dot com… and realized there that the entire ecosystem is now called MS365 Copilot App (formerly known as Office)… so I suspect there will be NO way to remove this stuff in the future, and probably that MS365 Copilot will eventually replace Windows itself.
While I wouldn’t assume anything is permanent these days, I’d agree for the moment. I had already uninstalled Gemini on my phone (2ish months ago) and just verified I still see Google listed as the default assistant.
AICore under all apps. Disable and delete files. Done.
This reminds me that i wanted to unlicl my bootloader on my phone…
Hey Folks, we have “AI” for you and you will use it, whether you want it or not…
I swear, whenever I try to use it, it just makes me wish I could delete it. I ask the answer to a simple question and it gives me a whole essay on how this one aspect of what I said is more nuanced than one would imagine, and I’m left there waiting 5 minutes to get it to say anything of substance, but it doesn’t when I explicitly tell it to “just give me the fucking answer”, which I have to say every time for it to say anything useful.
It also doesn’t work with timers or anything actually useful and I doubt it’ll get any better with third party app access.
Google assistant was so much better, it even still works with its servers being down (for me at least) because it’s a better assistant than whatever Gemini is supposed to be.
