If you install lineage without gapps for example, I think you’ll have great privacy.

Lineage or Graphene, yes?

I just bought a second Pixel 4a and can therefore now afford the slight bricking risk to install Graphene or Lineage.

I don’t understand. If I am using Android already, how does calculator make privacy worse? Calculations are not exactly revealing.

And if I am using graphene, why would I consider using any Google app?

I use the Signal a lot and have never been nagged to share my phone number.

If they could surveil the device to see the PIN being entered then no app would protect them.

My Signal only asks for a PIN about once per month so that would be a lot of screen surveillance hours to sit through in order to catch that moment.

More likely is that it was fixed since the breach but I cannot find release notes (hard to search on my phone).

SimpleX is decentralized, requires no phone number, based on Signal code. Screws up invitations via FB/Messenger though.

Regarding the trick of an adversary gaining access by emailing or SMS’ing a QR code for adding another device…

Why does the new device not demand the PIN before being added?

“The only metadata that Signal would have access to, is the phone number used to register, the date of initial registration, and the date of last use.”

https://www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/exd92f/what_kind_of_usermessage_metadata_is_observed_and/

In case people only saw the headline…

The sale is because a breach already happened: “hackers obtained personal data of about seven million of its customers in October 2023”.

They cannot afford the lawsuits.

I heard from a Redditor that his tweets were luring US scientists to EU and his visit was a recruitment drive. One USAmerican already took up the offer.

I imagine US does not want to identify him because although we could verify the above in his tweets, it would be advertising the lure for US scientists to defect.

And the French guy probably does not want to identify himself because je wants to make the US government look as bad as possible.

Not random, not as bad as the headline sounds but not worthy of banning anyhow.