A1kmm

The main criterion to evaluate a phone should be how easy it is to install your own recovery and system. Pretty much all vendor-provided distributions from any major vendor (regardless of which country) are going to make decisions in the interests of the manufacturer (including violating privacy, making battery management decisions that are more about planned obsolescence than battery life, not letting the owner have root access to install a real firewall, etc...).

Xiaomi is perhaps the most often recognised Chinese vendor as being custom system compatible - at least they have an official path to root - but the official path to rooting your own hardware after you have purchased it is rather dystopian. It involves download a Windows-only tool (or a reverse-engineered third party tool) that talks to their servers, creating an account with them and handing over lots of PII. Then you have to "Apply" to them to unlock your own bootloader, and give a reason. Then they make you wait a variable amount of time (which is sometimes measured in weeks) between when the software first tried to unlock the phone, and when their system will allow you to unlock the bootloader. They will not reduce the wait time if you contact their support and beg nicely for them to graciously let you restore your system onto a new phone that you bought with your own money from them, replacing another identical model that broke. Eventually, after making you wait, when you try again after the minimum time, their system generates a certificate, signed by them, that will allow your phone to transition to 'unlocked bootloader' mode, and let you flash what you like.

As such, I'd not really recommend the Chinese vendors unless you find one that doesn't make you jump through such ridiculous hoops. While I never recommend giving Google any of your PII, if you just want a phone to install your own system on, I'd recommend Google over Xiaomi etc... if within budget; they at least recognise that if you buy it off them, you should have the right to install privacy respecting stuff immediately (they do make you click past a warning that the bootloader is unlocked on every boot, but that is pretty minor and is two quick button clicks you anticipate in advance per boot).

One pro tip: Once you have flashed a custom system, get something like F-Droid installed as your app store, and install a good firewall from it (AFWall+ or similar; many apps you might install are not privacy respecting, and a firewall helps), and also battery management software (ACCA is good; manufacturers optimise for day-1 marketable battery capacity even if it will trash the battery within a couple of years that could otherwise last a decade; only using 5% - 85% of the manufacturer battery capacity, i.e. turning off charging automatically at 85% and shutting down if you hit 5% instead of 0%, will make your battery last many times longer for most of the battery life, and modern LiPo batteries last surprisingly well per charge to 85% if you aren't running lots of software that is wasting battery on anti-features).

I use https://f-droid.org/packages/mattecarra.accapp/ (with a rooted phone) to keep my charge levels within 5%-85% of the manufacturer battery range.

Most manufacturers made a decision to set the range their devices will charge to based on what is less likely to fail so quickly you'll get mad at the manufacturer, but they trade off significant battery life for slightly higher design capacity (or perhaps more likely, they see shorter battery life as a feature not a bug, as long as it doesn't catch fire, since it will mean your phone becomes e-waste faster and you give them more money).

Battery chemistry tells us that avoiding those extremes of high and low charge (shutdown earlier on low charge in the rare event that happens, stop charging at a lower level) drastically increases battery life - it is aligned with my interests, even if not the manufacturers'.

This seems extreme for the long tail of hobbyist apps. Finding 20 testers seems like a huge commitment for an unproven app, and I'm sure it would be a hurdle many apps currently in Google Play would not have gotten across if it existed then.

I wonder if this is a deliberate attempt to shut out hobby apps from their app store for whatever reason, rather than a good faith attempt to improve app quality.

In parallel they are also forcing people to publicly attach their real name to apps (people have long had to tell Google who they are to get in the app store, but not to make it public) - which might be another thing that is no big deal for big companies, but many smaller hobbyist app devs might think twice about doxxing themselves given how hostile people are on the Internet these days and how many crazies there are out there.

This would be very hard to protect against; if the attacker controls Linode and Hetzner, it is likely they also have access to the disks and memory for the virtual services, and not just the network. So extracting the private key for the real certificate is probably also on the table as an option for the attacker, and would be much harder to detect.

As they say in the article, end-to-end encryption such as OTR is probably important to avoid getting caught in dragnets like this.

Data being public (and privacy in general) shouldn't be 'all or none'. The problem is people joining the dots between individual bits of data to build a profile, not necessarily the individual bits of data.

If you go out in public, someone might see you and recognise you, and that isn't considered a privacy violation by most people. They might even take a photo or video which captures in the background, and that, in isolation isn't considered a problem either (no expectation of privacy in a public place). But if someone sets out to do similar things at a mass scale (e.g. by scraping, or networking cameras, or whatever) and piece together a profile of all the places you go in public, then that is a terrible privacy violation.

Now you could similarly say that people who want privacy should never leave home, and otherwise people are careless and get what they deserve if someone tracks their every move in public spaces. But that is not a sustainable option for the majority of the world's population.

So ultimately, the problem is the gathering and collating of publicly available personally identifiable information (including photos) in ways people would not expect and don't consent to, not the existence of such photos in the first place.

Phones have a unique equipment identifier number (IMEI) that they share with towers. Changing SIM changes the subscriber ID (IMSI) but not the IMEI (manufacturers don't make it easy to change the IMEI). So thieves (and anyone else) with the phone could be tracked by the IMEI anyway even if they do that, while leaving the phone on.

In practice, the bigger reason they don't get caught every time if they have inadequate opsec practices is that in places where phone thefts are common, solving them is probably not a big priority for local police. Discarding the SIM probably doesn't make much difference to whether they get caught.

Wait times are as high as 2 months (depending on how old the phone model is, etc...), and even as a regular Xiaomi customer, their support never seem to allow anyone to skip the wait, even if for example they broke their old phone and want to set up a new one like the old one (ask me how I know). During that period, MIUI is like a data collection honeypot, sucking up your PII and serving you ads.

It might be 'normal' now to Xiaomi customers to wait to be able to unlock the phones that they have paid for and own (perhaps in the same sense someone in an abusive relationship might consider getting hit 'normal' because it has been happening for a while), but the idea that the company who sold you the phone gets some say on when you get the 'privilege' of running what you like on it, and make you jump through frustrating hoops to control your own device, is certainly not okay.

If they just wanted to stop reselling phones with non-Xiaomi sanctioned malware / bloatware added, making the bootloader make it clear it is unlocked (as Google does, for example) would be enough. Or they could make a different brand for phones that are unlocked, using the same hardware except with a different logo, and let people choose if they want unlocked or walled garden.

However, they make money off selling targeted ads based on information they collect - so I'm sure that they probably don't want to do any of those things if they don't have to, because they might disrupt their surveillance capitalism.

Xiaomi phones used to be good for custom ROMs, but now they try to stop you unlocking the bootloader by making you wait an unreasonable amount of time after first registering the device with them before you can unlock. Many of the other vendors are even worse.

So from that perspective, Pixel devices are not a terrible choice if you are going to flash a non-stock image.