There are two backdoor potential you know. The software, which on my Huawei I prevent with a whitelist firewall which works so insanely well that it doubled my battery life, and the radio chip.

Sadly, whatever you do, on all phones manufactured in China or designed in the US, you risk a hardware backdoor you can never inspect.

What do you know of the radio chipset, taking electricity to connect to the remote antenna: it can probably ping, get signal from the mic and gps, or the camera etc.

If you re going to be paranoid, because you attack children or sell drugs, why the hell do you buy phones in the first place !?

> If you re going to be paranoid, because you attack children or sell drugs, why the hell do you buy phones in the first place !?

While the rest of your comment is accurate, this is disingenuous. There are plenty of valid reasons to have concerns over this besides those drilled by the powers that be.

Besides, it's still reasonable to want to reduce your potential attack surface. Sure, federal agencies may root you if they really want but that doesn't mean it's pointless to avoid OS-level preinstalled backdoors from the manufacturer.

IMO, the risk of a hardware backdoor is always there and perhaps less damaging if the country is across the world, depending on the threat model and damage model.

realistically you're right, and I probably would deeply consider my options before thinking about it. But we can go down the list of lower and lower firmware that we cant verify (hell, I just reread Reflections on Trusting Trust this morning). Every device has Chinese-made chips. I suppose it's more risky than an American company but to me it seems like rearranging chairs on a sinking ship, which is why I never keep anything sensitive on my phone.

> If you re going to be paranoid, because you attack children or sell drugs, why the hell do you buy phones in the first place !?

If you are going to joke, kindly mark it, so we do not misunderstand you, and so you do not cause internal damages to those who are not trained to always keep neurovegetative and limbic on guard while reading - you know, that occasional moment in which you trust what you read and the physiological reactions start, before the prefrontal goes "wait a moment, that may be not serious".

People have

-- a privacy to defend as a principle («privacy to defend», what times!),

-- absurdity to keep at bay (interrobangs have a cost - the paragraph above is relevant),

-- security to ensure (information which ends up in weakly protected repositories is basically public),

-- safety to strengthen (sociopolitical systems can make people pay for any minor trait)

and more?

One of the most absurd things I’ve read recently. Not being able to understand a joke is hardly on joker.

/If/ it was meant to be a joke. It can easily have not been one: it can easily have been unaware and/or insensitive of the expressed four points and more - many people are (see the diffusion of the "nothing to hide" stance). The content you called "absurd" is pretty literal.

The unawareness of the importance of privacy even as a cautionary stance is spread even in the learned, some convinced that we live in a riskless fair world of free thought and expression without consequence - there are people of prominent intellectual profile vocal against online pseudonyms, for example. There are political representatives proponents of the end of online anonymity.

So, no, when somebody makes those statements about child abuse and drug trafficking, they may not be joking.

Build yourself intellectually in a similar way, and you will reason in a similar way, and consequently express yourself in a similar way. Do not restrict your work to technical matters, which not only would be like training one leg and leaving the rest of the body to atrophy: good intellectual keys come from everywhere, and especially from good creative literature. The earlier the better for the plasticity.

For the rest: do not abuse the assumption of good faith. There are other places than HN to abuse informal attitude.

Edit: for both cases, replies to secondaryacct and yourself: you do have the rule about assumption of good faith in the guidelines present, don't you?

In that case: it was not swallowing but digesting, and it was not one dictionary but very many, in many languages. But it is not the dictionaries to change the linguistic use: the literature and the intellectual keys acquired from all areas form the capacity for complexity, shape that complexity and its expression (so, for example, more mathematics than philology). The "dictionaries" (the research about language) come later in the process of verification of what you absorbed initially less consciously.

Now, this thread was about computing devices, branching towards security, privacy and its importance - not linguistics -, and your comments may be interpreted as intellectual curiosity as per the rules, but can more easily be interpreted as a mockery - as already mentioned. I am open to questions, but I think it proper for that to happen in a different context.

Sometimes that is felt, but abilities compensate the friction - emotions settle on trust, which is good coin.

> If you re going to be paranoid, because you attack children or sell drugs, why the hell do you buy phones in the first place !?

Because innocent people can be persecuted too. Just ask many of the ethnic groups across the globe, or other abuse victims.

Privacy protects innocent people from criminals, more than it protects criminals from the good guys.

What firewall do you use?

For someone not living in the US how much of a problem for privacy and tracking is it?

Being tracked by US or Chinese government how is it different to me? Honest question by the way, not trolling.

Apart from fighting political dissidents, tracking is used for targeted ads, i.e., to force you to buy staff you don't need. Many people are not fine with psycological manipulation.

If I am not mistaken those can be turned off on miui at least the ones embedded in the system apps.

In jurisdictions under the GDPR that is indeed the case.

Yeah, we should strive to get European tech free of US three letter agencies power.

> worth the price if you can bypass the malware built into it.

how much work is it to flash it to your own software? can a layperson follow some instructions and get it done without deeply knowing anything?

Instructions are usually pretty clear (eg. XDA posts for ROM releases or LineageOS wiki pages are usually quite clear, the latter being more than the former IMO). It might be harder, but usually laypeople can get by (eg. aren't particularly knowledgeable but perhaps aren't afraid of using the command line either, even if it's just copypasting). At least that's the impression I get from people posting on XDA.

Either way, I can usually flash ROMs without issue (I don't know a lot about Android but I do understand how my computer works, I guess), but when I do it I usually get incredibly nervous and panicky out of fear that I'll brick my phone or I forgot to back up something important.

Well, the fitness band didn't have its firmware flashed. that's not where the tracking is anyway. It's a different app being used to collect the data.

Recent models of many Xiaomi bands require an authorization code that must be taken from an existing account that has linked with the watch. If someone's skilled enough to run a python script they can get the code and install Gadgetbridge.

Tracking for mi band is in the android app rather than the band itself. All you need to do is replace it with a more privacy focused app.

author here: Xiaomi make Google and Facebook look restrained, it's true.

That said, I basically declared data bankruptcy a while ago, and I'm literally one of the people who should know better (Open Rights Group founding member, etc).

This phone is relatively new, and the open-source Android replacements are typically multiple models behind. So basically someone who can has to step up.