napoleonsdumbcousin

They did not ban encrypted communications in general. They just banned the use of Signal for official purposes, because it is not fit for the job.

The article talks about how there were a multitude of cyberattacks and phishing attempts on EU officials’ smartphones and Signal accounts. With Signal, you have full control over the whole Account if you control the device.

The EU has their own encrypted communication tools with security and accounts managed centrally by the IT department.

Ah, ok I understand.

It is a replacement of SMS and MMS on cellular networks with more modern features

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services

I have no deeper knowledge of this topic, but to me it seems like Wikipedia is disagreeing.

No one enables it to “give Google data”, they use it to get apps to work that use it as a dependency.

Well yes of course, but you are still giving away your data, regardless of intention. And a privacy feature of GrapheneOS is that it redirects location data requests to the OS by default. Thats why you have to disable it in the settings if you want Google to have this data.

RCS is neither.

AFAIK it is specifically meant as a replacement for SMS and is used with regular pre-installed SMS Apps.

But if you’re using it for privacy-from-Google purposes you probably don’t care about those.

Correct, I am not using GrapheneOS to then give my data to Google willingly. Kinda defeats the purpose I would say. I think it is the right thing that this is blocked by default and you have to actively turn it on. (Edit: I am assuming that you are talking about the fact that location data gets redirected to GrapheneOS by default, which can be changed in settings)

also RCS

Is this a country-specific topic? I don’t know anybody who still uses SMS/MMS to communicate. Everybody uses WhatsApp or Signal where I am.

As someone who uses GrapheneOS with sandboxed GooglePlay on his only smartphone (with daily usage for years at this point): I don’t know what kind of adjustment you are referring to. I never had to adjust to anything, because I never encountered anything that GrapheneOS couldn’t do that stock Android could. Follow the installation process and after that the phone behaves like a regular phone, except you have way more options regarding security and privacy.

Is your friend trying to use GrapheneOS without any Google services maybe?

https://massgrave.dev/

Updates are free if you want them to be.

Recently a user here did the math on that and the fair/eco part of fairphone is really miniscule (they spend less than 5$ per phone and a big part of that are fairwashing credits). Unless you need the repairability or the specific specs, you might be better off to buy a cheaper phone and just donate money to a good cause.

Here is the original post: https://lemmy.world/post/32013987