It’s not a bad approach, to evaluate what that person is going to do and provide suitable options. I do think the starting from less, and adding as you need it has some merit, as modern smart phones bombard older users with a lot of things.
Exactly, in my case we have an E2EE room in Matrix, sufficiently we can post pictures, and messages to everyone in the group without outsiders being able to read them. I like element because there are suitable desktop apps that aren’t a pain to use. Multi device support is good.
I didn’t really have to pretend. One thing to remember about older people is they come from a generation where these things didn’t exist. New and packed with features isn’t necessarily something they find exciting.
They are going to care far more that they can do what they need to do. In this case my dad usually wants to:
Search for a phone number or something in search engine with Vanadium
Read an email Gmail, Proton Mail is a good alternative here though and have done that with some family members in their 70s. Due to the minimal usage it gets we didn’t bother
What frustrates him is “changes” so, sticking between his mail app, vanadium and element has been a very constant experience. We use the official google messages/phone app in order to avoid annoying spam, which works pretty well.
When I made that post I was referring to like the original post not really yours, though I did respond to yours in some parts, sorry if I wasn’t really clear
That’s very spot on. To expand a little bit on this, it’s very hard to spy with hardware alone, you probably do need some software to help with that. That’s where that whole Intel ME discussion comes to mind. IME is a whole computer inside your computer, like the aliens in Men in Black. It has full access to your main computer’s memory, network, everything. And it has it’s own…OS and who knows what. Yaiks.
As for other systems, we basically have to rely on people who know more than us. Asahi Linux folks say the individual hardware components in Apple silicon Macs are isolated and don’t have the same level of access of IME, so you should feel assured if you trust them.
Same for the Pixel. The GrapheneOS people say all the dedicated hardware components are completely isolated not only in Pixels, but in virtually all modern Android phones.
I just tend to think of it as a risk/reward for Google. With all the very legal ways Google can spy on you to get the information they need, where is the benefit to using some form of illegal hardware monitoring? Logically it just doesn’t make much sense for them to attempt.
Would you mind saying what happened, I am not understanding what you are trying to infer here?
@Grunge164 - If you can take your man’s phone and remove unnecessary permissions for certain Google Apps and Google Play services and also to samsung services. They run privileged anyway but removing them is still a good idea.
And how a lot of it can seem far-fetched and conspiratorial at first glance
Just to sketch a brief outline, Snowden worked as a government contractor for the NSA who went on to leak the NSA’s overreaching surveillance programs, one named PRISM which collected data from tech and communication companies. Although they didn’t create “backdoors” in the traditional sense, the program created a more streamlined system to funnel data back to the NSA, following whatever broad guidelines the NSA used to determine whose data should be obtained; with little to no oversight
I didn’t bring it up to raise paranoia, but to reecho the sound advice of exercising a healthy dose of caution and skepticism regarding big tech (or any tech) and the government, because honestly we can never know for sure, especially since the government has little inclination to respect our right to privacy and the Fourth Amendment
Google monetizes your data in two ways. First, by running it through its algorithms to sell ads to their actual clients (not you). They use and keep probably no much more than what is stated on its privacy policy and allowed by the user in the settings. They even have very ethical internal reporting system to identify and address privacy policy breaches.
Second, by selling your data to the government. That part needs to respect no policy, no settings, no GPDR, no CCPA, no law, no nothing. And you can bet your a$$ the government would pay extra extra (not only money, but favors) to be able to see what those high-threat-model people are using their GrapheneOS-running Pixels for. @minerva did the favor of linking some very relevant articles, and we also have the Twitter Files revelation that the government actually pay the companies for helping in spying and censoring.
So it’s not ad money that should go in the risk/reward calculation. Of course I’m not trying to imply that there are any such thing as hardware backdoors, just that the incentives might actually exist.