To be clear, I have a phone number, but I do not WANT to have one. Most aspects of my life I have removed my phone number from. There are still a few services ( like signal! ) which requires one, and I cope. Cellular data is also something worth avoiding, from a privacy perspective. It is very possible to live a life where you’re never very far from wifi, especially in a city. I do not currently do this, but would love to one day.
Good to know!
Is the phone number required for 2fa codes or anything like that at any point ?
It affects its use for me definitely. I don’t want to have a phone number. At all.
You can choose to share a username instead of a phone number, but they still require the phone number at setup iirc.
Signal requires a phone number on setup.
Also, matrix has bridges, which alone make it worthwhile for me. They, of course, don’t help privacy, but they are so so nice for convenience.
Matrix is definitely slow though, and a grand majority of the clients are heavy terrible buggy electron apps. There are a few good ones ( nheko and the new beeper clients ), but even they have some rough edges.
I still use matrix all the time and love it.
If max privacy was the goal I think simplex looks wonderful. No required info for sign up, no way for them to possibly collect any metadata ( because there are no identifiers sent over internet for anyone at all ), E2EE, and decentralized.
My understanding is that Google wallet won’t work with grapheneos. It does with lineage ( with play integrity fix ). This is the only reason I use lineage. I’d love to not have any Google services but Google wallet is just such a huge value add. I don’t carry a physical wallet at all and it’s great. I wish there was a libre alternative to Google wallet for tap to pay, but sadly it does not look like that’s happening any time soon.
What if they gave you the files, with an easy download button ( with rate limits on downloads per user to avoid mass abuse )? Then, Netflix is basically providing a debrid service, which many people who pirate already pay more than 5$ for. Your VPN for torrenting is likely more than 5$. It’s already trivially easy to rip a movie off a website ( even with DRM ), so this is not a real content control loss for them.
And it’s not even a compellingly better alternative than the other options. Gitlab, or gitea, or forgejo are all great.
Mobile data you pay a service provider for and link all of your information to ( address, name, etc ), and can be used by one company to track your location at any time with very high accuracy as long as you are near 3 cell towers. Public wifi gets no information about you other than your MAC address and that you’re currently within it’s range. There is no central body that can track all your movements. You could, theoretically, buy prepaid data plans to minimize the info they know about you, but then you have to buy a new one each month, and there’s STILL one company tracking all your movements each month, though they don’t really know who YOU are. They could still do traffic analysis to figure that out.
It’s not that it’s less secure, it’s that it’s worse for privacy.
Also, messaging over SMS / MMS is awful for security, which I lump in with the rest of this conversation. https://youtu.be/wVyu7NB7W6Y