World Affairs Brief, January 29, 2021 Commentary and Insights on a Troubled World.

Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution permitted. Cite source as Joel Skousen’s World Affairs Brief (http://www.worldaffairsbrief.com).

How to Reduce Spying by Your Devices

Google is using your phone to track your movements and can even tell through bluetooth who you may be associating with. Here is a dramatic video demonstration of the kind of tracking Google does with your Android phone, even while it is in airplane mode. It is tracking all your movements, in detail, and can tell when you are driving, walking or going up in a tall building. It will shock you.

Learning how to take Google off your Android phone is not easy, but it can be done and the result is surprisingly functional. Depending on your phone you can load a new operating system from microG. The result has most of the core functionality, but you have to get used to different apps that are available from F-droid, which is not connected to Google Play.

But before you do anything, watch this video by “The Privacy Guy,” Rob Braxman, on what choices he made. You do have to be technically savvy to do this. He explains how you can anonymously download some apps without revealing your identity, and which apps to avoid to reduce tracking (hint: anything connected to Facebook, WhatsApp, etc.). And, he explains why you can’t do this [hack] with an iPhone.

De-Googling an Android 10 Phone

Mar 14, 2020

I go through the process of deciding how to configure an Android phone so there is no Google tracking of any sort in it. This video shows me using Android 10 AOSP on a Motorola Moto G7 Play (a 2019) phone, which currently has no support from LineageOS.
I vet several apps for use in a de-Googled phone and describe how it is possible for Android apps from Google Play to work when no Google services are available. A Moto G7 Play is a Project Treble phone and uses a standard GSI (Generic System Image) Which then has to be configured to support a particular phone model.