Choose your phone!

Your options are:
- company that seeks rent on every transaction that happens through the phone
- company that tracks your location, habits and usage to build detailed profiles on you to inform advertising
- custom ROMs that can’t run your banking app

@stevenimpson GrapheneOS runs my banking apps fine. 😂

@stevenimpson <sigh>

@stevenimpson I choose battle.
So far we are winning, google pay still works on my lineage rom. Only my car app does not.

@stevenimpson yeah consumerism is not really freedom

@stevenimpson I'm in my 70s in the beginnings of dementia. It's true what people don't know. My group (all my age) asked me to make a dynamic web environment for their events, so I set up a blog, and then they were all like "what's a post?" "how do I find one" "what's a search form"

My spouse and I have clamshells and a land line. The only smartphone in the house is a burner I bought to use as a $35 camera (very good for that). We, umm, bank in person.

@stevenimpson I think of these, advertising is the puffed up threat.

Cybercrime is #1 every time, and frankly I think it's (sadly effective) marketing to make people place "ads" higher in their consciousness.

@stevenimpson I know this pain... LineageOS couldn't run the banking apps last time I used it without tons of lame drama. So back to #2 for now.. But someday....

@stevenimpson the last point is annoying. I live in a rural area, so mobile banking is crucial. I never use a custom ROM but I'd like to have the option available to me.

@stevenimpson turn this into a poll 🙃 i choose option 3, my bank's website works fine.

@josh @stevenimpson sure, but knowing it exists, installing it, and then maintaining it are all things well outside the skill of most users.

You're not wrong, it's just a niche option for edge case users.

@John You make a good point. Google having a detailed profile on me to target advertising makes me uncomfortable, but having these massive personal data stores either leaked or intentionally sold to data brokers fuels a different type of harm.

@MisterMaker Fighting the good fight, my friend

@trib @stevenimpson I don't think it's hard to install or hard to run updates so I can't agree with that.

Edit: it literally installs via Google Chrome (via WebUSB) tells you everything to do on the device too.

Updates are handled like normal.

Edit2: @GrapheneOS is the fediverse account for the project.

@trib @josh @stevenimpson
Also, GrapheneOS works exclusively on devices produced by a company the whole business model of which is "tracking your location, habits and usage to build detailed profiles on you", so even if you are willing to invest time into not partaking in all that personally, you are still supporting it with your money.

@m0xee @trib @josh @stevenimpson #DivestOS is fairly good from a privacy/security perspective I have heard. And it runs on more devices.

@josh @stevenimpson tell that to my Mum who won't upgrade her phone because she's afraid she'll break something. She’s not an outlier by any means.

Technically capable people are a rarity, even though to us we look like a multitude (because most people we know are like this). In years of working as a designer of services (including web and devices), it’s *very* apparent that many (and likely most) people lack what we would consider basic technical skills.

Here's another example: I'm sure you know what a URL is, and how you would access one directly. Most people don’t, and that's why Google is so powerful. People type in, say, “passport” and hit the first link. They have no idea it's an ad and end up inadvertently paying a middle man to prepare a visa or passport application despite the fact they could have gone to the right place and done it themselves. This is *absolutely* a real example I have seen come up in research and people are horrified when you point out the reality to them.

@josh @stevenimpson follow-up to your edit, offering answers that “normals” would give:

- What's Google Chrome? Is that the internet?
- What's a WebUSB? Do I need to go to Officeworks and buy another USB stick?
- What's a fediverse? Is that Facebook Messenger?

I am absolutely not taking the piss. This is the sort of thing I saw every day in a nearly 20-year design/UX career.

@trib @stevenimpson I realise I'm not normal, but pointing it out does hurt the feelings. I was just offering my opinion since the toot was public on the internet and all.

@trib @stevenimpson

So much this. I worked in customer service for a government office for years, helping people with, among other things, submitting forms online.

There were a lot of browser issues. No one knows what a browser is. In the end, we'd ask people something like, "when you want to get on the internet, do you click a blue 'e', a colourful circle, a compass, or a fox?"

@josh @stevenimpson oh, I’m absolutely with you and wasn't being critical; rather I was noting that we're often blind to the incapability of others. The technical incapability of many people frustrates the crap out of me, because (as you and I both know) these things are often almost trivially straightforward.

Aside: my Mum *is* upgrading her phone, but only when I see her in 5 weeks and I can do the job for her.

Being technically adept - and I'm pretty good to journeyman standard at a bunch of stuff both computer-toucher-wise and in making and fixing stuff - is pretty rare, and we should take some pride in it. I feel like as much as it drives us a bit mad, we have an obligation to help people we know who struggle.

@trib @stevenimpson and very few people knew where to type a url. We resorted to helping them find the right google result.

Otherwise, they'd end up at an American Dermatologist website instead of ours.

@stevenimpson easy, first option, then do all your transactions in the web browser 😉

@stevenimpson I take option 2 every time. 😢

@stevenimpson Actually... there's better option. Real Linux... that can still may not run your banking app, but is actually reasonable way forward. Check out Mobian / Droidian / PostmarketOS.

@stevenimpson Which also means choosing your bank.
Somehow I landed on one which doesn't forces to run bank-malware, while few friends had to change of banks due to this.