I’m planning on using /e/os on my Xiaomi phone (codename miatoll, can’t use the recommended ROMs). I’m aware it has a bunch of security risks which I’m willing to take as long as it gives me some privacy from Google.
However, given that it comes preinstalled with privileged MicroG, is there anything I’m actually gaining by switching from stock android? I haven’t been able to find much information about MicroG, so if it’s running 100% of the time isn’t it the same thing as having stock android? In terms of data leaked to Google, I mean.
microG is minimal overall (as the name suggests) and doesn’t include a lot of the tracking/telemetry and other nonsense that Google adds to Play Services. You can see this for details on what functionality it includes.
microG is less than ideal (especially when privileged), but it will still minimize the amount of data that Google gets and what tracking they can do. I think it’d be worth it in your case and give you a nice privacy increase.
Worth noting too there’s also a lot more to consider than just Google in terms of privacy. Stock OSes on Android are typically proprietary and include a lot of bloatware and other garbage, and usually aren’t very privacy friendly at all, so using an alternate OS will also keep you private from Xiaomi and their friends at the CCP, and will free you from any other modifications they make to the OS.
Basically , with microG you still give some mandatory info to google on daily basis , but now you have much more control over what info you send as microG is an open implementation of play services
What different microG does is it feeds fake data of device id , gsf id , asked by google servers , thus making it harder to track you even after a device reset.
In normal stock roms , some device identifiers like imei and imsi would never change even after a reset or using different google accounts thus making harder to be private.
Some telemetry apis like ads api and analystics api are simply not supported to further stop the collection of data.
The main goal here is to prevent device level fingerprinting to an extent without breaking much of the usability of android as majority apps are dependent upon play services for push notifications and other apis.
While using microG , you are expected to not use any google sync services and provide only pseudonymous data to the OS.