jackal wrote on September 5, 2025 at 1:07 AM

Tldr: Unless your phone is running Lineage, Graphene or similar, without Google/Facebook and such spyware you do not have privacy nor security.

The long explanation is that it depends on the phone and what operating system is running, a stock Android experience is not private nor secure by design so if you're doing something that could get you in trouble with the government you will want to do such on a proper computer running Linux. On the latest and upcoming phones surveillance is gonna get worse than merely big tech getting some telemetry data and profiling shenanigans, upcoming phones will have hardware acceleration to make LLMs and AI power efficient, they definitely can and will snoop through your shit 24/7, taking screenshots or even screen recording, piping them through the algorithm and sending the digested data directly to their servers, with high accuracy and bypassing computational constraints because your phone's hardware will be doing the heavy lifting.

Saint_Cuthbert wrote on September 7, 2025 at 6:38 PM

Would there be an opt-out? Can those privacy violations be mitigated, or should we all just go back to using landlines? Where could I research this matter further?

jackal wrote on September 7, 2025 at 7:51 PM

Will there be a choice to opt-out? Yeah, you'll probably get a button somewhere to express that you don't want to be spied at least if you're in Europe. Will there be any auditable method for them to prove that they do respect consent? Nope, they never truly cared about consent in the first place if they make these opt-out rather than opt-in, mostly because they know that if this was opt-in most people wouldn't use it as it doesn't benefit them.

The problem is that this software is proprietary, the phones are proprietary and they give far more control to Google, Apple, Samsung and manufacturers than users, that's exactly why we have the privacy and security nightmare we have today with smartphones, and they're trying the same moves on computers as well, albeit with less success.

Where could I research this matter further?

See every single top-notch/latest flagship smartphone being announced from any major brand: Samsung, Google and Apple are all selling local AI assistant as a feature on these upcoming phones.