 Hi, gonna be doing some videos again. I wanna talk in this video about different all free software ROMs that you can install on cell phones. Do I recommend them, which ones do I recommend? Now, most people who watch this channel can probably predict that I'm going to say something about number one recommendation is not to use a cell phone. Okay, we'll talk about that. But I'm gonna do this as a responding to an email video because I got a perfect prompt for this. So this is from Harish and he says, hey, Luke, I heard you say that you don't use a smartphone due to the reasons such as it is not private and such. Okay, well, actually, let me stop you there. We'll talk about privacy, cell phone privacy and stuff like that. The reason I don't use a cell phone, sure, I guess that's technically one reason, but the primary reason is that if you use a cell phone, you're stupid and boring. Okay, it makes you stupid and boring. It makes you annoying. It's annoying when people use phones, it's obnoxious. That's the main reason and they create a bunch of anti-patterns that make you less of a person, frankly. I mean, let's be real. But anyway, going on with this, what are your thoughts on Graphene OS? It's a secure and private operating system based on AOSP and it's completely free, Libre. It's minimal and simplistic and also comes with a basic selection of apps such as camera, camera, blah, blah, blah. Okay, so I'll read more of this email. I'm not dismissing it now. So, there are a bunch of different ROMs you can install. Now, I do have a cell phone that I use to record videos and ignore texts that I get. And on this cell phone, I actually have lineage OS installed. So there are a couple of these ROMs. There's lineage, there's Graphene, there's Calyx. I want to say like the PopOS people, they might, maybe PopOS runs on phones. I'm not quite sure. I might be misremembered. I don't know about that one. So if it's true, I don't know. So I think, here's the tricky thing about it. Most phones, most people out there, if you try to right now to install one of these on your phones, it will not work, okay? Because the hardware that these can run on are very picky. Like the thing about cell phones you need to understand right off the bat is that cell phones are basically, like every cell phone is worse than the worst Mac hardware in terms of can you like repair it? Can you replace it? Nowadays you can't even take batteries out, any of that kind of stuff. However, if you're looking for a new phone, I do recommend you look up one of those OS's, Graphene, lineage, blah, blah, blah, and get a phone that is compatible. Ironically enough, the easiest phones to de-Google are actually usually Google Pixel phones and that's actually what I have. So I do have lineage, but I will say this guy is shilling Graphene. I will go ahead and say that if I had the choice now in the ability, if I needed to reinstall something on my phone, I would absolutely install Graphene. And there are kind of two reasons for that. One is that Graphene is basically better that, maybe I'll read it, maybe he probably says right here, okay. So there's no telemetry in anything. It also allows you to use proprietary services if you need an app compatibility as a sandbox and privilege app. That's not really clear what he says, but Graphene OS, so on all these free software ROMs you can install like Aurora Store or like some kind of, which is basically a non-Google front end to the Google Store, where you can download this kind of stuff that Google offers and all the stuff in their normal app store. Graphene OS actually does it one better because they try to sandbox the application in ways that respect your privacy if you actually wanna use it. Of course, you can normally use Efteroid. Now on my phone, I only have Efteroid. Efteroid is the free software package manager for like free software ROMs. It only has like good stuff in it, not none of this Google stuff, but there are a lot of normie apps. Of course, they're not gonna put their stuff on Efteroid. So it is nice to have Google Play or some Google Play compatibility. Graphene OS makes it a little bit more private. So Graphene OS, another reason, again, all of these, they'll have free software, but Graphene OS actually just has, like they add a dash of better stuff in all respects. So another thing off the top of my head, I know that they have that I don't think anyone else has, maybe someone else has it, but I know that Graphene has it, is Mac randomization. So when you connect to a Wi-Fi network, your Mac address is randomized. If it were not, it would be a lot easier to kind of spy on you, like figure out, okay, this device connected at this time and then over here at this time and stuff like that. So that decreases your metadata footprint. And Graphene OS has a lot of other nice little features. You can turn off, I'll probably talk in a second about why all cell phones, like even if you have all free software, they're not private, okay, just to be clear, but Graphene OS does, I think they have an LTE only mode. So if you wanna turn off like inherently less secure methods of communication, like traditional text messages or calls and stuff like that, you can do that. You can turn off 2G, 3G, 5G, whatever, you can do that kind of stuff. So Graphene OS, they just do things just a little better. I'm trying to think, I know they do other things as well, but so that would be my recommendation. Like if you have a choice, if you're looking to get a new phone and you wanna install one of these on your phone, Graphene is the best, I would go to their site. And of course the tricky thing I alluded to before, they don't just run on any phone. You have to kind of pre-select the right hardware. So go to Graphene site. If you're looking for a new phone, see the phones they're compatible with, get one of those, and then you can install it, right? Trying to install it on whatever phone you probably have right now is just not gonna work because like, again, phones are like built to be annoying. They're built to be, they're worse than Mac hardware. Like, I mean, cell phones were invented in the post-Mac era. So now everything, you can't even remove the battery, I don't know, some phones you can't even, they don't even have normal SIM cards anymore. They're trying to get away from SIM cards. Anyway, I'm gonna continue to read this. Even Edward Snowden says that he uses it, Graphene OS, and says that it is the most important software project of this decade. I wanted your thoughts on it, blah, blah. So those are my thoughts. The problem, I'll continue reading this email, but the big problem with cell phones, I'll go ahead and get into it, is that if you have an all-free desktop or laptop, you can pretty much rest the shirt that you're not being spied on unless it's through, unless it's through a website or some web service you're using, right? If you're using all-free software, you can kind of trust, okay, things are good. I have a good metadata footprint that's not like compromising everything I do. Of course, ideally, you should have a Libre-booted machine as well. So if the government wants to use the Intel back doors, which exist, and I don't know, maybe some people are in denial about those, but they're in the public information. But if you have a free desktop, you're pretty much good. You're pretty much, as long as you watch what you're doing online, you don't have to worry about your program spying on you. But cell phones are kind of inherently different. And I would say, although you're getting a lot of stuff, I don't wanna make perfect the enemy of the good. It is a good thing. It's definitely a good thing to have a all-free software ROM on your cell phone. However, even if you do, there are still inherent issues with cell phones because in order to use them as cell phones, you have to connect to cell towers. That's how it works. And that automatically is giving the system information about your location and other cell phone data. It's tied to your cell phone plan. They can figure out who you are. It's easily anonymizable, de-anonymizable, okay? It's not, even if you're just giving out metadata on the system, that metadata is very easy to tie to a person. Even if it's anonymized, it can be easily de-anonymized. That's kind of what I'm getting at. You guys know in the Mineratopia presentation I give, I did show this video of how you can trace like cell phones and how they move around and stuff like that. It's super easy and it's very easy to de-anonymize them. So even if, you know, my phone which has lineage or if you have graphing, this is still a problem, okay? And this is principally how people are tracked via cell phones. So if you watch like forensic files or shows like that, obviously when the police are chasing a criminal, they're usually not gonna call up. I mean, they do occasionally call up Google and get information about them. But usually the easiest way to do it is just see, okay, look at their phone records. Who did they call at this period? And then, oh well, this guy like, he connected to a cell tower near the, where the body was buried or something. So we know that he was there, right? That kind of stuff. That kind of stuff is, that's the easiest way to monitor people on cell phones. And even if you're running all free software, that's still there, right? Now I'm not, you know, I'm not giving like criminal advice to people but realistically speaking, like this is how it is. There's still like a metadata mind that they can use against people, okay? And that actually, that reminds me, I wanna make a brief note just on the importance of privacy. I've said before, it doesn't matter to me much if Google has a lot of information on me just in itself, like if they just happen to know all this kind of stuff. My privacy is not really super important. And I think most, this is why it's so difficult to convince normies to use Linux and all this kind of stuff because they're tethered in the real world and they realize, well, it doesn't make a big difference, right? If some company has all this information on me because realistically, I mean, kind of doesn't make a difference. But the importance of it is not just you. What I've said is it's not my privacy that matters, it's systemic privacy. I don't wanna live in a world where everyone's metadata is out there. Therefore, we can design AIs and we can have companies like do all this targeting and marketing and we can have them like manipulate trends and all this kind of stuff. That is worrisome. That's actually much worse than, oh, the government knows that I went on a trip to like a town nearby or something like that. That doesn't really matter. Now, I don't want them to know that just because it's none of their damn business. But that's not really a big problem. The bigger problem is what kind of world are we creating if we don't have systemic privacy, right? So if you are using a free software computer, you're at least doing your part, right? Even if you're not getting big marginal benefits from that. That's why I don't like, I'm not on normies doors like knocking saying, hey, brah, wanna install like GNU slash Linux, wanna install Graphene OS, I'm not doing that. I'm not interested in doing that because it's an ideological thing. Once it clicks with them that, oh, like we're heading toward dystopia and I'm gonna do my part to put my foot on my break. That I think is more important. So that's just about, I don't know, that's about privacy. So anyway, I'm gonna keep reading here. So you suggesting or just talking about it will help scale the project along whatever. Funding is now becoming lower than ever for the project due to people like Henry Teclore spreading, I don't know, I don't know about this. So please recommend it, do a tutorial, no. So I'm not gonna do a tutorial on it. So because tutorials on phones, you just have to follow the documentation. I don't know about the Teclore guy. I know the only thing I know about him, I don't have opinions on like YouTube people generally. Only thing I know about him is I think he was at Monerotopia, I didn't talk to him, but he was like the only guy wearing a mask. So that's all I have to say about him. Actually, no, you know what? Someone did send me a video from that channel. And I think, oh no, it was actually very stupid. So no, it's good. I'm talking about this because it sent me a video from that channel where it was like, oh, I'm using like stock Android now because I like the security of using like the Google, like privacy protections where like Google literally scans every single thing on your phone against hashes or something like that and to check if it's secure, which is freaking ridiculous. So yeah, I mean that, this is for a separate video. I don't know about this particular guy, that's the only thing I've seen of him and it obviously painted him very badly. Maybe he's okay. I don't wanna have that out there that I care about this, I have opinions about him. But what was I gonna say? I do feel like there's a tendency in a lot of privacy people nowadays to take the easy way out, I guess. Like I view this as an issue of no compromise. Like obviously I'm never going to say, even though like I'm kind of against cell phones in general, I'm never gonna say, oh, just like, oh, you stock Android or something like that because it's no big deal if Google has your data. Again, as I said, for you, it is probably not a big deal if Google has your data. Like everyone in the world knows that, okay? Facebook has all this info on you, right now it doesn't matter. But the way you need to look at that is that that is not only a permanent liability for you in 40 years when the legal and governmental structure changes, they're still gonna have this info on you when we're living in a outright cyberpunk dystopia. But additionally, it's just unethical to participate. Like if you know, if you're watching this channel, you probably know better than to use proprietary software. You are feeding into a system that is manipulating people with AI, with targeted ads, with like a lot of political stuff nowadays, they're very much targeting things to people based on the metadata that they can get off of them, okay? So that is my view of it. I think it's just unethical, even if like privacy respecting ROMs are crappy and you can't get your favorite apps to work, I would still be using them just because, which isn't the case, like mind you, it's not, I don't know, maybe on cell phones, I don't know what people even use on cell phones. Maybe you can't do your wordles or whatever normies do. I don't know how it works. But definitely on desktops, maybe it's hard to convert to Linux or something like that, but like your day-to-day computer usage is only gonna be improved. It's just like the pain of transition. But if you know better, I don't think you have any excuse to not use as much free software as you can. And again, put your feet on the pedals of the car that would otherwise lead us to a cyberpunk dystopia. Maybe it'll take a lot of other people pressing on their pedals to actually turn on the brake, okay? But I'm gonna do my part, you better do your part. So yeah, I do like Graphene OS. I've never used it myself. I mean, functionally speaking, all of these privacy respecting ROMs work about the same. If a privacy feature messes up some app you like, you do have the ability to turn that off. You can install Google stuff if you want. Honestly, the only Google software that I think is still better than the free and open source variety is Google Maps. Because frankly, like the mass surveillance, that does get you something on Google Maps. I will tell you that because it's a, it works just, actually to be honest, I should do another video on OpenStreetMap. Actually, maybe I haven't done a video on OpenStreetMaps, but yeah, it just doesn't have as much stuff. It's really just search. Like the search feature is not as good as it should be. Google Maps just does better at that. So that's about it. I've definitely rambled on this one, but when you ramble, it actually gives people a more holistic view of what's going on in your head, frankly. So hopefully you'll have a very clear view of my view on cell phones. Ultimately though, using any cell phone right now, unfortunately is always going to cost you privacy. And more importantly, as I said at the beginning, it makes you stupid and boring if you use a cell phone all the time. So please don't, but if you do absolutely, next time you get a cell phone, make plans to install Graphene or another free and open source ROM. And I think that makes all the difference. So yeah, that's all I have to say. Bye. I revised that. That's not all I have to say. There's one more thing I have to tack on. So Graphene OS, I do recommend. Lineage OS and Calyx are okay because they do that bare minimum, but here is a dishonorable mention for both of those. I totally forgot about this in the video. Both the Calyx Institute and the Lineage OS people signed the anti-Richard Stolman petition. If you remember that from a year or so ago. As far as I'm concerned, that is at least extremely worrisome. Possibly signs of them just being like intellectually compromised. So that's really bad. I don't know what else is I think that's shameful. That's pathetic, but you know, they probably don't care, which makes it even worse. So that is another reason why to prefer Graphene. Now obviously I did not immediately uninstall Lineage on my phone because I find it freaking annoying to install ROMs on phones. But next time, whenever I have to buy a new phone, I will absolutely make sure that it's one, which will probably be in 10 years because you know, I use old stuff. But actually now there's so much planned obsolescence they're gonna force me to update to some news freaking 666G or something, I don't care. But whenever I have to get a new cell phone, I will make sure that it's a Graphene compatible one and I'll install that instead of Lineage. But that's all I have to say.