• Tor browser for anonymous/private regular browsing (without logging into personally-identifiable accounts)
• Vanadium (GrapheneOS’ Chromium-based browser, maybe it’s usable on non-GrapheneOS as well?) in combination with a good crap-blocking DNS server
• Brave is decent but has some bad default settings, can probably be configured to behave well (similar to regular Firefox)
• Firefox + forks are generally not that great (at least on Android?) because their sandboxing capabilities (and maybe other security features) are weaker compared to those of Chromium-based browsers. See also: https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing
• Commercial browsers like Chrome, Edge, Opera, and so on all contain loads of on-by-default-spyware and should never be used

Yep. There’s always been spying from foreign governments’ intelligence services on allies (especially from the US and the UK because they have such vast surveillance capabilities and budgets), and there’s always been commercial spying (e.g. Google, Apple, MS, and others collecting vast amounts of data on everyone using their proprietary software), which then could also be bought by intelligence services to expand their data mountain. It’s really nothing new at all. Also, this was all basically part of the infrastructure already. Of course it’s going to keep running.

Also, there were these thin excuses of “data protection” agreements between US and EU like “Privacy Shield”, which were on incredibly shaky or non-existent legal grounds the whole time (some of them also got taken down already because they were such a joke to begin with), only to sort of “legitimize” and “make legal” the vast amounts of sensitive data that are flowing from EU to US when using US software and services, despite EU laws stating that many of those data transfers aren’t actually legal. Basically, to protect their own institutions as well as tons of EU businesses who are trapped in, for example, the Microsoft software ecosystem, so that they can continue to use these software products containing spyware and not feel too guilty about it because it sort of got defined as being lawful.

So all of this, including the hypocrisy behind it, is nothing new at all. In theory, we have all these fancy data protection laws, but in reality, almost everyone either ignores them or doesn’t get it.

What’s new is only that before Trumps’ 2nd term, this sort of stuff was “accepted” as either “necessary” (in regards to the intelligence services spying, because this always was excused with “national security” reasons, which has been the favorite universal wildcard excuse for any sort of mischief by government institutions) or simply as “irrelevant” (in regards to everything concerning data flowing somewhere where it shouldn’t be flowing to at all) by a majority of the population including politicians and other entities which could hit the brakes on this stuff. And it is only now when people realized that Trump’s 2nd term might turn the US into a fascist rogue country, that there is some kind of regret suddenly growing about the own previous mindset. But only now. As long as the US was interpreted as being our friendly ally, it was never officially considered to be any sort of problem, maybe even considered beneficial. Except of course by experts in the area, but who listens to experts, right?

Right-wing extremism is always anti-science, anti-education, anti-establishment, anti-constitution, anti-human-rights, anti-globalism, pro-nationalism, pro-traditionalism, pro-religion (but only the religion they themselves believe in), pro-authoritarianism, pro-discrimination, pro-genocide. Trump’s administration is doing exactly what the Nazis did during 193x-194x. Except the neo-Nazis of today hate it when they are compared to Nazis. History doesn’t repeat itself in every detail, but it rhymes.

Just for reference, this is what the Google Play services app transmits roughly every 20 minutes to Google if it has network access:

Phone #
SIM #
IMEI (world-wide unique device ID)
S/N of your device
WIFI MAC address
Android ID
Mail Address of your logged in Google account
IP address

And that is when you have disabled ALL telemetry in ALL of the options, even the most hidden ones. So this is the minimum amount this app is always gathering from every Android user using the Google Play services app, no matter what you selected. Other Google apps (like the Play store app) could then contain additional telemetry on top, this is just the common base of all Google proprietary apps. Or the minimum amount of privacy violations you get when using proprietary Google apps on your phone, no matter what.

If you use GrapheneOS, I’d recommend not installing/using ANY Google apps at all (not even Play store or Play services). To get apps, you should use (roughly in this order of priority): 1.) GrapheneOS’s app store for the built-in apps 2.) Accrescent app store (has several good open source apps, is intended to be more secure than F-Droid) 3.) Obtainium (for getting open source apps directly from their source repos) or if you really can’t get into Obtainium, use F-Droid instead 4.) Aurora Store (for getting apps from the Google Play store without sending too much data to Google. Only do this if there is no open source app available for doing the same thing).

To fully mitigate the removal of the Play services app, you also should probably install/configure something like ntfy to get battery efficient push notifications and ideally use apps which also use that, e.g. the Molly fork instead of Signal. It’s quite easy to do, just something to be aware of. Otherwise your battery drain might be a bit higher. Then you’re also independent from Google’s push notification infrastructure. But you need a ntfy server to go along with it, either self-hosted or use a public one. There are some privacy friendly ones public ones out there.