XPost: comp.mobile.android, alt.privacy   
   From: spam@nospam.com   
      
   Chris Green wrote:   
      
   > Andy Burnelli  wrote:   
   >> What steps do you perform on your phone expressly for privacy purposes?   
   >>   
   > I don't use it for anything where privacy matters and I have no   
   > accounts on it (i.e. I don't have an associated Google account).   
      
   I'm in the same boat you are, as is everyone else.   
   Functionality first, privacy second.   
      
   Not having the Android phone set to a Google account is, in my opinion and   
   yours apparently, a good tradeoff between functionality & privacy.   
      
   No great loss of functionaity versus a great enhancement in privacy.   
   That's a fair deal in my book (and, apparently, in yours).   
      
   Having set up umpteen Android phones for privacy, I appreciate your   
   confirmation there are others who don't associate the phone with any Google   
   Account.   
      
   However, in the functionality first, privacy second set of tradeoffs, there   
   are "some" Google apps which provide a functionality that no other app can   
   provide, are there not?   
      
   Take the simple example of owning a Google Account, which gives you the   
   functional advantage of 15GB of email storage (and spam filtering).   
      
   Can we get that functionality elsewhere for a good tradeoff in privacy?   
   I've found protonmail isn't close. Neither is Yahoo. Nor Apple mail.   
      
   Luckily, we can still obtain a reasonable functionality first, privacy   
   second tradeoff (IMHO), if we ditch the Google GMail app on Android, and   
   use any decent FOSS privacy aware replacement MUA, such as FairMail.   
   https://github.com/M66B/FairEmail   
      
   A counterintuitive fact of the functionality first privacy second   
   calculation, paradoxically so, is that the same GMail app on iOS is more   
   private than the GMail app is on Android.   
      
   That's because the instant you log into the GMail app on Android, whether   
   or not you want it to do so, it _creates_ a Google Account on the phone!   
      
   Yet the iOS GMail app does not.   
   What do I do then to preserve functionality & privacy?   
      
   I use GMail on iOS and on Android I use FairMail instead.   
      
   There are other similar calculations that I run which others may benefit   
   from my clarifications, where, for example, the Google Voice app provides   
   functionality that I can't find elsewhere for citizens of the USA.   
      
   While WhatsApp provides similar functionality (in a different way) to   
   European citizens, in the USA most of us use cellphones and landlines.   
      
   The Google Voice app provides free USA cellphone & landline calls, both   
   ways, to a POTS number, and that's an important funcdtionality.   
      
   However... as with the GMail app on Android, the instant you log into a   
   Google Voice account on Android, the Google Account is created on Android.   
      
   Not so with iOS.   
      
   Hence, yet again, to balance functionality & privacy, I use the iPad as a   
   speakerphone telephone (via the Google Voice app) while I completely shun   
   Google Voice capability on Android.   
      
   It would be interesting to learn from others who care about the   
   functionality and privacy calculations what other ways there are on Android   
   to preserve as much as we can of both.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)