Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

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.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

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founded 4 years ago

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How on earth is Google allowed to lock android using FRP and force everyone to sign-up using their phone number. Where is the EU ? (lemmy.world)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I was looking at buying a new android device with either android 12 or 13. and I wasn't ready to see how all phones shipping with these versions have forced sign-up using a mandatory phone number. the step cannot be skipped , and workarounds are very tedious and sometimes require a PC.

Where is the EU when you need them. how is it acceptable to force people to sign-up to your spying software when they want to acquire a smartphone?

Are there no laws in place to forbid this type of bundling between hardware and forced subscriptions ??

Are there any privacy non profit organization that can take them to court ?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

When setting up, you can skip adding a Google account. It's not mandatory. Neither is a phone number unless you want to actually use the phone as a telephone.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Factory Reset Protection (FRP) only applies if you signed in a Google account and then did a factory reset via the recovery or a computer without logging out of the Google account. The purpose is that if someone steals your phone, it's a useless brick without the ability to log back into that same Google account.

Unless you buy a stolen device, as a user, you should never have to worry about that.

If you really want to, you can just skip the Google account on first setup, unlock bootloader and nuke the Google stuff entirely.