Intro

Hello everyone and welcome to the Manly Hanley Podcast. This is the Podcast with no limits on what we'll cover.

I'm your host, Randy. Have a snack, sit back, and relax.

This Episode was recorded on Sunday, November 13th, 2022

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Tools or Servers I Run to Avoid Big Tech Tracking and Selling my Data

• A Pixel Smartphone running GrapheneOS.

• Android and iOS track the hell out of you - out of the box.

• Apple tracks you a bit less out of the box than Android does.

• GrapheneOS allows you to avoid a lot of Google tracking on Google's own phones.

• GrapheneOS is a custom ROM/OS that you can flash to most Google Pixel smartphones. It allows you to avoid using Google Play Services/Framework/Store. You can use multiple user profiles to (for example) setup your work apps where you might want to use Google services, and then perhaps a personal account where you block everything related to Google. It's brilliant.

• I've not seen an easier-to-install Android ROM than GrapheneOS. Their installer works right in the web browser, and it's solid: Worked on the first try for me when plugging in my phone and following their guide! I was blown away; Flew right out of my chair.

• There are some downsides that you might know about until you try it out, such as not being able to use Android Auto. If you want something to be highly-secure, you're going to have sacrifices. If someone tells you otherwise, they're lying.

• Wallabag

• An Open Source "Read it Later". It extracts only the article's content and places it into a nice view. It even lets you highlight areas of the content that you're extracting and add notes!

• They mention that they don't store data on US servers. They write:

"Because your data belongs to you, we don't want to store them on US servers. That's why we only chose European partners, like Online (french web hoster), MailJet (french emailing service) or PayPlug (french payment solution)."

• It's important to note that, this solution is still great in that you can host it on your own US server, since it's open source. I do what I want with my server. The coolest thing is that you can export your data from Wallabag and reimport it into your own instance. This would be great if you wanted to sign up for their service as a trial, end the trial, and move the data to your own server. Amazing!