Privacy

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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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The German university KIT provides almost 30 free and open-source privacy-friendly Android apps. Example: A QR Scanner (secuso.aifb.kit.edu)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by Novocirab@feddit.org to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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The best way to install them is through the F-Droid store, which is a catalogue of FOSS software for Android. It's installable by downloading the .apk file linked on the front page of the F-Droid projec'ts website. The mentioned apps from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology can then be found by searching for "SECUSO", which is the name of the research project behind them all.

Alternatively, you can also get them through the Google Play Store under this link or again by searching for "SECUSO".

In particular, I recommend getting the QR code reader, because many of the free-to-use scanners route everything you scan through their servers, so they're obviously collecting your data.

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[–] clonedhuman@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week ago (7 children)

There's a lot of good stuff on F-Droid, and it's nice to see a university doing a project like this.

I'm still waiting on a solid, consistent alternative to Android. It seems we might be getting there with tiny steps.

[–] Novocirab@feddit.org 6 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Yeah, the Android alternatives I have in mind are LineageOS, GrapheneOS and /e/OS, but I'm not sure on how good their privacy is. Most importantly though, they're often not available for older/non-mainstream smartphones.

So policy-wise, a useful step could be to get wider standardization of smartphone hardware, to reduce the efforts needed to port alternative OSs there.

[–] smee@poeng.link 3 points 1 week ago

I've been on lineage for ages and recently tried out /e/, was pleasantly surprised. Reminded me of a reskinned lineage with some FOSS/F-droid apps integrated into the system and some extra privacy stuff.

I particularly like the fake location and app tracker features.

When it comes to standardisation, there's a minimum defaults-based system called GSI where the same distribution works across a lot of devices. But minimum defaults leaves a lot of devices specific features dead in the water. It's more for development than distribution.

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