WHY? I’ve heard a lot that LineageOS cannot be called a private system. That it is more about extending the life of old devices. Can you tell me specifically point by point why it is not private? And I’m sure it’s better than stock phone firmware in terms of privacy.

  • The Hobbyist@lemmy.zip
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    9 months ago

    Location alone is probably enough to deanonymize you. Think about it: it shows where you live, where you work, when you leave for the office and when you come back. Who you see and when. What your hobbies and interests are. Where you go grocery shopping and when. There is a tremendous amount of information in location alone.

    One example from 10 years ago (did not read, just linking a research paper that comes up on this topic):

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022000014000683

    • Atemu@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      edit-2
      9 months ago

      Edit: This is wrong, AGPS exposes the nearest cell tower together with your IP address. Still a very minor bit of info, even for Google.

      To my knowledge, AGPS does not expose your location. It’s a protocol to get satellite position data via IP instead of waiting for the satellites to send it to you at staggering 50bit/s.
      At no point does location data leave your device here. It couldn’t, actually, as you don’t know where you are; that’s why you’re fetching the position data.

      The only data it does expose is that your current public IP tried to download satellite data at time x. Not ideal as Google could technically mine a bunch of data out of just that but it’s not a huge leak either.