Hello guys. I recently acquired a Pixel 8A and it was Google stock os I bought it from a man locally all with cash I brought It home and I flashed grapheneos onto this phone.

What else needs to be done to anonymous this phone and make it a privacy phone and a spy free phone no tracking phone no interception phone and no monitored phone.

Any advice welcome!

Thanks.

  • Lemongrab
    4•1 month ago

    You can’t blend in with a crowd of vanadium users with the amount of data points given away by the browser. Your fingerprint will be decernable from other users. Without actual anti-fingerprinting, which theoretical can allow for a crowd only when fingerprinting of user browsers results in the same fingerprint ID, the best you can hope to do is thwart naive fingerprinting. Vanadium doesn’t have any anti-fingerprint built in, so the slightest differences between user can be used to easily fingerprint. Vanadium also has no strong method of in browser content blocking (eg an adblocker like uBlock) which is required on the modern web to remove JS tracking scripts (or straight allow and deny lists for specific web contents). Adblock is cyber security: https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2022/PSA221221

    Examples of metrics include, but are not limited to, the following: Timezone, system and browser fonts (often automatically fetched by websites as a remote font that is cached by the browser), language, screen metrics (DPI, height x width, refresh rate, pixel ratio), canvas, CSS fingerprint, useragent, browsing mode (standard/private), video autoplay policy, audio device fingerprinting, installed plugins, cookie policy, device theme, and of course IP.

    As a graphene OS vanadium user, assuming that the browser stays default, you would still have screen, audio, other hardware metrics, canvas (this one is a killer), IP, user agent (differences in installed versions of plugins and vanadium itself), timezone, remote Fonts, and others. Fingerprinting is an insane science which needs actual protection against to even begin hoping to create a crowd.

    See some more details below.

    Info on fingerprinting (about choosing a desktop browser but still relevant info): https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop-browsers

    Browser comparison: https://divestos.org/pages/browsers

    Fingerprinting test site: https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/