Hello guys. I recently acquired a Pixel 8A and it was Google stock os I bought it from a man locally all with cash I brought It home and I flashed grapheneos onto this phone.
What else needs to be done to anonymous this phone and make it a privacy phone and a spy free phone no tracking phone no interception phone and no monitored phone.
Any advice welcome!
Thanks.
Congratulations on your first steps in GrapheneOS!
In order to best help you and give relevant suggestions, we need more information of who you are trying to be private from.
If your threat model is particularly sophisticated, it may be recommended that you do not use a sim card, or at least never when your phone is at home. Instead, exclusively rely on WiFi. It may also involve desoldering your microphone and camera and only make calls using an earpiece.
These are not recommendations, but simply examples of how far one can go with respect to their threat model. If you would rather want to avoid “regular” spying by google, Facebook and the likes, you may be better off selecting a private DNS (for example Mullvad’s extended DNS which comes with social media filtering https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls ). You would need to make sure you do not install Google services (nor microg) and especially no google apps.
Much more can be said, but we would need specific information about your case to provide better guidance.
EDIT: I do not want to give the impression that GrapheneOS does not make a good job in improving your situation already. They do! But to do more you would need to justify it with your threat model, that’s what I’m getting at.
I have already inserted a sim card into this phone. The sim card is a kyc sim card. I want to do best I can without compromising my identity. My threat model does involve government interception and tracing, but it’s more about staying Safe with this phone whilst I’m possibly under surveillance. Local police entities. More so than government contractors / third parties. What is best VPN to use in this phone? I rely in the sim card in this phone so always keeping in aeroplane mode isn’t possible as this is my primary number and I need to have constant connection to it. In this case, what shall I do with this phone?