“What's it to be: Android or iPhone?”

Actually, NO! There is another way.

Time I Learned: there are freedom-respecting phones.

I'll tell you which one you need.

(For the literal minded: It's just a title. I don't really think Christmas is about buying gadgets. This article is about freedom in technology.)

What's the problem?

What's so bad about choosing either Google or Apple?

Many of us today are increasingly concerned about the vendor lock-in, advertising and data mining perpetrated by Apple and Google. They are so pervasive that it's hard at first to see all the avenues of social human interaction and creativity in which we could be harnessing the power of our computers and our electronic connection to others, all these avenues from which Big Tech have cut us off, as they steer us through their own product pathways according to their own commercial objectives.

In short, we are carrying around general purpose computers but we are artificially locked in to using their power only within the vendor's own playground. Read: The General Purpose Computer in Your Pocket. Those mega-corporations ensure everything we do is steered toward making their advertisers and shareholders richer: attention grabbing, commercial subscriptions, ads and so on. Not towards what's best and nicest for us as people.

We've been subjected so completely to their way that it's hard to imagine any other way. Hard to see that the nuggets of convenience we'd have to give up would be as nothing compared to the adventures we'd gain by switching. We can't see the wood for the trees.

Yet, the alternatives are here. We don't have to accept it's a choice between a rock and a hard place.

What we can do instead is choose tech that unlocks the power of these personal computers we carry around, and lets us use them for purposes that make no profits but enhance our own social lives. Gentle technology. Small Tech as opposed to Big Tech.

Once we make the leap and begin exploring the previously untapped possibilities, we begin to appreciate what it feels like to be released from Big Tech's constraints. It's not a stretch to say those companies had pressed us into their servitude, and now we can be free. That's what I'm feeling, and I want us all to have that opportunity.

Which Freedom-respecting Phone?

The one that stands out as best suited for ordinary people is built upon a deGoogled version of Android:

• Murena /e/OS smartphones
  
  • deGoogled, Android-compatible phone
  • with deGoogled “cloud” suite: email, docs, storage, etc. (free or €2~20 /month)
  • choice of phone models (€300~600) including Fairphone

  
  

Being freedom-software (open source), the maker guarantees your freedom to use the tools they provide or change to others. What does that mean in practice? For example, if you don't like the terms and conditions of the Murena cloud software suite, you can use a different one provided by someone else, be it an independent commercial provider, or run by your school or club, or at your best techie friend's home. And then you don't even need a Murena account.

How is this degree of freedom possible? First, with the slogan “my data is my data”, Murena is committed to these principles. It was founded by Gaël Duval, the creator of Mandrake Linux. Second, in contrast to Google's Android which merely contains some open-source software components, this technology stack is designed around open source principles. Their cloud service is not only based on Nextcloud, but is designed to be compatible and interoperable with similar services run by lots of other providers and individuals. Together, and in stark contrast to the Big G and the Big A, these mean there is neither a practical lock-in nor a legal lock-in.

How to get one?

• The no-fuss solution: buy one
• The techie friend option: ask the friend to set it for you on a second-hand phone.

“But I'm Not Average”: Other Freedom Phones

If you are not the average person, or if you want to learn more about the alternatives, read on.

I recommend Murena for the average person because their offering is so inclusive: the phone hardware, the cloud services, the freedom to take or leave parts of the system and adapt it to your needs, compatibility with most smart phone apps, and working in a way that is broadly familiar to a lot of people already. I hope we will soon see other providers like them offering a no-fuss all-included solution too.

These alternatives will appeal more to techies and to people with particular preferences or needs, and the ability to spend a bit more effort instead of buying an all-in package. With most of these, you or a techie friend will need to do one or more of: install the operating system software on a suitable phone, setting up any “cloud” services you want, or using apps that are currently less mainstream.

That said, these are quality and important alternatives.

Purism in particular is an outstanding company dedicated to making freedom and privacy centred devices. If their Librem phone isn't for you, check out their laptop, server, security key.

• Purism's Librem 5
  
  • Linux-based phone OS
  • convergence with Linux desktop: run desktop apps on the phone, or plug into a monitor and use as a desktop computer
  • company dedicated to software and hardware freedom and privacy at all levels, and working with wider FOSS community

  
  

Shiftphones in Germany sells modular repairable phones (and laptops, headphones, etc.). While their current SHIFT6mq comes with a Google Android pre-installed, the interesting thing is they offer an easy and built-in way to install an “upgrade” to a degoogled android version. Much easier than degoogling any other phone.

• Shiftphone SHIFT6mq detailed Review including thorough instructions on degoogling it, and suggestions for additional settings and apps.

Iodé is a small company in France selling phones pre-installed with deGoogled Android, with extra privacy features.

• Iodé's new or refurbished phones
  
  • deGoogled, Android-compatible phone
  • choice of phone models (€210~730) including Fairphone

  
  

For techies, there are more deGoogled Android distributions that you can download and install yourself on a suitable phone:

• LineageOS or LineageOS for microG
• CalyxOS
• GrapheneOS

The phone operating systems from the vendors mentioned, all being based on freedom software, can be self-installed too:

• install Murena /e/OS
• install Iodé
• install Purism's PureOS

(Where are the iOS-based freedom phones? That's not going to happen: Apple locks its users into its own walled garden completely. See The Neighborhood and The Nursing Home.)

What Does Julian Use?

Personally, for myself and family I am currently using LineageOS-for-MicroG. I chose that option because I am a techie, experimenting with the various options on a budget, so I tended towards those I can install myself on a wide range of old and new phones. And because it is quite close to mainstream Android so a majority of mainstream apps run on it. And because my less techie family members needed the reassurance of being able to continue using their familiar Google apps to begin with, and only gradually migrating to freedom-software, one app at a time when they are ready, from Chrome to Firefox for example.

I have experimented with others. I really admire what Murena is doing, and have self-installed /e/OS on an older phone. I am considering switching over to it on my main phone. I would want to set up my own compatible cloud service rather than using Murena's, because I will not compromise on using my own domain name as the key to my own data services. I believe Murena and other companies offering “your own data” services should for this reason always offer “bring your own domain”. For now, the situation is that Murena's service is open source with the source code repository ecloud-selfhosting in “beta” status. (It is to be congratulated also that they host their software forge on their own domain rather than using the anti-freedom github.)

This article is part of my Open Source Gadgets series.

#fossGadgets #android #degoogled #lineageOS #eOS

Feedback:

• email me: julian@foad.me.uk
• matrix me: @julian:foad.me.uk

Donations gratefully accepted

Feedback:

• email me: julian@foad.me.uk
• matrix me: @julian:foad.me.uk

Donations gratefully accepted

Julian Foad

2021-01-08 12:13:36

How do people identify you online?

• some-name on WhatsApp.com / Facebook.com / Twitter.com / etc.?
• some-name@gmail.com / @hotmail.com / @outlook.com / @icloud.com / etc.?

Whether we call these our id’s, addresses, accounts or handles, most of our identifiers look like these. The bad news is these identifiers are not ours. They don’t belong to us. We are just borrowing some-name from some.company .

If they so choose, some.company can block our account, or start charging for it, or give it to someone else, or change how “our” account works, or start posting adverts on it. They can mine “our” identifier for marketable metadata about ourself and our contacts, or censor what we can and can’t use it for, or sell the management of it to another company, or delete the data we stored there, or do anything else they choose. It’s neither legally nor practically ours. It’s one of their business assets, and they owe us no loyalty whatsoever. If the service is “free” then we and our attention are the product being sold to their real customers such as advertisers.

[1]Most of us are trusting people expecting to live in a stable world. We trust it will just continue to work, for free, for as long as we want it. Especially if we’re the president of the United States of America [2]. Oh, how the world proves us wrong.

Owning One’s Identity

There is a better way.

By owning our identity, we can set our own rules when a silo’s ToS do not suit us. For one example among many, some of us might want to talk to our children. If I am using WhatsApp, signing up my children is forbidden. I am not allowed to use the same silo to talk to my children that I use with my adult family and friends. But when we run our own matrix server for our family, then we can give our children their own accounts, under our supervision, and exchange messages and photos and make calls with them.

There are two sides to owning our online identity (or identities). We need to have both legal ownership — to be allowed to use it — and practical ownership — to be able to use it.

• Legally owning our identity means we must use identifiers such as myname@myname.org where the domain name part (myname.org) is registered to us personally, rather than borrow a name that is issued by some.company and therefore remains under their control.
• Practically owning our identity means we must have the ability to communicate without requiring both ourselves and our contacts to be customers products of some.company. Our communications technologies need to be “open” in the sense of freedom-respecting and universal, like email is, in contrast to the “silos” or “walled gardens” like WhatsApp, Twitter and all the rest whose users can’t talk to anybody outside them.

Legally owning our identifier means retaining the rights to that identifier, even when we change providers of any services. In practice today we are talking about identifiers based on DNS domain names. Years ago, domain names like example.com were the preserve of companies, universities and governments, but nowadays anyone can register one for around £10 to £30 a year. A domain name remains ours for as long as we pay the domain registration fee. The domain name registrars are strictly regulated, giving us about the highest level of guarantee we could achieve in today’s world. (In principle of course they could be overruled or changed by governments, as could anything.)

Practically owning our email is quite straight forward, because email is based on standards that are non-proprietary and universal. (Companies like Google have tried to put their own hooks and claws into the process but they have not gone quite so far as to make gmail incompatible with standard email, thank goodness.) Because of this, we can independently register our own domain, choose our own email address at our domain, and rent an email service from an independent email service provider (such as Fastmail) and attach it to our email address(es). We can even copy our email history onto it, set up forwarding from the old email account to the new one, and so on. And the important part about “ownership” is if this rented service should ever become unavailable or unsuitable, we don’t lose our email address, and we can rent an equivalent service from some other company, transfer the address, and so keep on using our own same email address without our contacts even noticing the transition.

Practically owning our social media and instant messaging had been not impossible but mostly impractical until, at last, around 2020 there has been massive development and uptake of freedom-respecting and universal options, and their names are now becoming well known. The ones I want to call out are:

• Matrix (universal instant messaging)
• the Fediverse (ensemble of federated social media including Mastodon, Plemora and many others)

---

Footnotes:

[1] Even if we were to pay rental for one of these silo services, that would not change much: they tend to offer no real service level obligation, and can still stop it or change it or do pretty much as they wished in all other regards.

[2] I wrote this article at the start of 2021, after President Trump’s Twitter account had been “permanently suspended” (cnn.com, nypost.com).

[3]John Battelle wrote about the same problem in 2012: Who Controls Our Data? A Puzzle.

https://blog.foad.me.uk/2021/01/08/is-your-online-identity-yours/

Trump permanently suspended from Twitter after Capitol siege

Twitter on Friday took the unprecedented step of banning President Trump’s world-famous account from the platform “permanently” — less than two weeks before he leaves office. “After close review of…

^{Ebony Bowden (New York Post)}