Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid

Re:Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid by chirau on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @06:07AM (#47150023)

I would like to try Cape. How do guys deal with IMEI tracking from folks like Google when i search or use their email? Or that one is beyond your control?

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Re:Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid by throawayonthe on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @07:48AM (#47150833)

Can you elaborate?

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Re:Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid by ThePowerOfFuet on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @11:07AM (#47153422)

What makes you think Google has access to your IMEI through using their search engine?

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Re:Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid by bdangubic on Thursday February 26, 2026 @02:10PM (#47170604)

Friends at Google :)

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Re:Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid by ThePowerOfFuet on Friday February 27, 2026 @11:26AM (#47182395)

Chrome may well have access to persistent identifiers on Android, but websites do not.

The search engine has nothing to do with it.

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Re:Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid by alek-cape on Friday February 27, 2026 @01:24PM (#47183736)

I thought access to IMEI and IMSI was pretty heavily restricted starting with Android 10. Graphene [1] makes a few extra restrictions beyond AOSP [2], but it's been around for a while now.

To get access to IMEI and IMSI, you need to either be a carrier app, allowlisted, or grant the `READ_PRIVILEGED_PHONE_STATE` permission.

Unless Chrome is running at a system level in AOSP or some OEM specific firmware, I wouldn't expect it to have `READ_PRIVILEGED_PHONE_STATE`

[1] - https://grapheneos.org/faq#hardware-identifiers

[2] - https://source.android.com/docs/core/connect/device-identifi...

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