Drawbacks of imported Pixel phones in countries where it's not sold

General
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I encountered this article detailing the experience of a journalist using an imported Pixel 7. It inspired me to look at previous discussions on this forum, there is not a lot of advice for folks living in countries where the Pixel is not sold.

Since imported phones may have issues with VoLTE and phone calls in non-supported countries, they must rely on Wi-Fi or WhatsApp/Signal calls. However, you may be installing Graphene OS anyways, so all this could be a non-issue as long as it is paired with a secondary device.

If you do live in one of these countries, I would love to learn about your experiences with purchasing and using imported Pixels! Do you think it is worth using it along with a burner phone?

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I do live in one of these countries, and imported pixels are too prohibitively expensive to even consider due to ridiculous import taxes. If it cannot even work as a phone, then I guess there really are no good options for us, even for those with the resources.

I still use the phone I bought in 2019. It’s terrible in terms of security but I have few options. A phone costs about the same as a month’s worth of minimum wage and I’d still have to go for a privacy invasive device. It’s not worth it, in my opinion (why would I pay this much money just to be spied on all the same?)… I could and probably should try to move at least my WhatsApp to a BlissOS VM in my laptop at some point in the future.

I understand why PG doesn’t want to recommend other devices but maybe a section on how to neuter a potentially compromised device would be helpful. I’ve been thinking about purchasing a “soundproof bag” for a while but I don’t know where to even look for one, if it’s even viable, etc.

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I guess one issue would be weighing whether it is better to use a end-of-life phone with verified boot or a Lineage OS phone with an unlocked bootloader. Chances are that most people in your situation chose the latter because of similar issues with purchasing new phones.

For most cases, I feel like compartmentalization is the best bet. Don’t do anything sensitive on these android devices and keep them to a separate desktop computer or laptop.

Do you mean a faraday bag?

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I agree. Both are insecure, but LineageOS is at least privacy respecting.

That would be ideal not possible unfortunately, school/banks/doctors pretty much require a phone # for contact.

No, faraday bag is for electromagnetic signals, a soundproof enclosure is to prevent a potentially compromised device from listening to conversations.