No you’re right and you make great points. I don’t actually want to believe that these are just evil companies looking for any and all ways to profit off of us. It can just come off that way for sure. But I liked your breakdown and understanding of things

I think Xfinity routers began doing that actually. Here’s directly from their website: https://www.xfinity.com/hub/smart-home/wifi-motion

If there wasn’t any value in it I don’t see why it’s getting implemented at all, but it is and it exists.

I hate to use the slippery slope argument but I’m tired of forcing myself to believe that these private companies are moral have any reason to protect us. They don’t. It feels like everything is about power and control, from flock and axon to this router tracking shit. if it doesn’t make sense, it’s because it’s not supposed to, and the feature being implemented has ulterior motives

Edit: and yes I know they say they don’t track your movements but these companies lie all the time. I’m not just going to take that at face value. It’s time to start treating these companies like the biggest liars on earth (because they kind of are) until they’ve earned our trust back

I run three profiles: main profile is where all my FOSS stuff is, every day things, no tracking stuff allowed. And of it does, I just revoke network permissions. No Google play services or play store installed on this profile at all

Secondary profile has banking apps, basically anything at all to do with money or requires Google play services to work. I even disable network access for most of the apps on my secondary profile until I need to use them. Google play services and play store are installed on this profile.

Third profile is dedicated navigation user that just has Google maps and other amenities like music for listening while driving. I have this one separated because I allow my secondary profile to run in the background and I don’t want Google maps running in the background so I created a third user. The third profile doesn’t run in the background. It’s pretty easy, I just switch to it when I need solid navigation. This of course also has play services installed. I know this is overkill. It’s just for myself because location tracking is a particular peeve of mine

All my profiles have Molly installed and connected up so I never miss a text or call between profiles

Use Faraday pouches or leave your phone at home this Halloween. Flock cams gather Bluetooth, cellular, and WiFi data as you pass by them

Oh sick! Glad to hear that

Well that’s cool that local backups worked. I also bsck up to a USB flash drive so good to know. So you still haven’t been able to link your profiles? That’s so weird

I currently have Signal set up in all my user profiles on GrapheneOS. I use Molly though so slightly different, but I think its needed for this to work. here’s what i did:

Molly is set up in my owner profile. open the app, go to settings, link a device, select the camera option so you can scan a QR code. This just speeds up the process of linking, you’ll see later. Exit the app and switch profiles. Download Molly onto desired secondary profile, if its already installed just proceed reading. Make sure “allow running in background” is allowed for that user profile and that Molly has unrestricted battery access on both profiles before you try to link accounts. On secondary profile, open Molly and tell it to link a device. Tell it to use QR code to link accounts. You should still be on secondary profile at this point.

With another device, take a photo of the QR code that was generated from your secondary profile. Right after that, as quickly as you can, switch to your owner profile and scan the photo of the QR code that you took a photo of. The QR code expires after a certain time after its generated, so the faster you can scan, the better. Since we opened the camera for QR scanning before switching profiles, as soon as you open Molly on your owner profile, the app will open straight into the camera. It might fail to scan the first time. I scanned the QR code repeatedly until it asked me to confirm linking the account, to which you can say yes. It can only port over the last 45 days worth of messages so don’t expect to have it be a mirror copy of your owner profile. But any messages from then on out will save and will be so much more convenient instead of switching user profiles to respond to a text.

As others have mentioned, local backups wont work across profiles, so be weary of that. I think backups will only work on your owner profile. I would just re-link my profiles again and accept that Im going to lose old messages on my secondary profiles if I needed to use one of my local signal backups. Like I said this is just a more convenient method of being able to use signal across profiles. Like for me, I have a completely isolated user profile that has google maps and android auto installed, and before i figured this out, i couldnt respond to signal messages or calls while on a long road trip for example, which was inconvenient beyond belief especially when trying to plan things with my group while navigating. Yes I would get cross-profile notifs so I knew when I was being reached, but I dont have to switch profiles and interrupt my map directions anymore when I respond.

Also, enable “exploit protection compatibility mode” on all instances of Molly to save on battery. Before I enabled this, Molly was using so much battery that I could have a screen time of less than an hour all day, and still hit a low battery notification every day. I’m talking, when I look at my battery stats by the hour, Molly will have consumed 39 percent of my battery for that hour, and after enabling the compatibility mode, its down between 1 and 5 percent and my phone actually lasts all day again. I wanted to bring this up because especially if you’re running Molly on multiple profiles, if you let those user profiles run in background, your battery life will suffer majorly unless you have exploit protections on.

Hope this helps. If anyone has critiques for my setup let me know. Besides the obvious that I probably have slightly less security or whatever

Edit: added extra detail

What is the name of this app?

It’s awfully ambiguous with the data it provides. I feel like if you were given more info it wouldn’t have been so scary, but instead it’s just labeled “14 companies” with no extra information.

Are you able to tap on it to get more data?

This is interesting. Maybe there’s an explanation for it. Leaving this comment to track this

Let’s normalize categorizing this sort of behavior as non-dickish. Now, more than ever, and especially on the internet, we should be questioning everything we see. We must stop passively ingesting everything we see on the internet as fact. So good on you for questioning.

edit: grammar

Close, its “the infographics show” channel, but now that I think about it, both channels have pretty similar art styles

I’m just so numb to this shit by now. Privacy is dead. It seems like EVERY company, even companies that aren’t ad agencies like Home Depot are collecting, scraping, and selling data. Literally everyone does it now. Capitalism is dead. Nobody wants to make money by creating an actual good product, it has to be taking advantage of you in some form.

This modern world fucking sucks and nobody will do anything about it. Even me as I type this paragraph out I recognize the irony in me saying this because I should be out there actively doing something about it if I’m so passionate about it right? I try where I can though. I use all FOSS from my phone to my laptop and I boycott companies I don’t agree with. I try to make friends and family aware. I can’t do much else without upending my entire life though.

Plus nobody cares. Everyone is too fat and happy with iphones and tiktok that they will passively accept these increasingly worse conditions and laws while those of us with morals are left behind