After participating in as many collective learning activities as peer learning, Knowledge transfer sessions, Crypto parties, hackathons at swecha, and when I got to know about what Surveillance Capitalism, mobile freedom was? Then I started looking at some articles, blogs written by people at swecha on topics like “what are the steps one can take in the privacy direction?”.
Majority of the mobiles come with a pre-loaded software called “Google Android”. With the surveillance capitalist model of data platforms, the surveillance capitalist giants and their minions collect an overwhelming data from these devices we own. With many historical revelations, we have known that these surveillance capitalist giants have been indulging in mass surveillance for the benefit of their interests.
After knowing all these things. I thought of de-googlify my phone and tried using different techniques, doing it by following a post in discuss.swecha.org and got to know that i have a horrible android phone(Vivo Y17) where I can’t unlock bootloader and flash then I tried taking help from the Mobile Freedom group and posted this question “How do i degooglify this mobile(Vivo Y71)?” The responses I got to the question which i post is that Vivo is little tough to de-googlify.
There are three options for me, disable manually or build custom rom, uninstall using adb (which is tough for me at that time) So, I didn’t take the risk to experiment with my android phone using adb, cause I need to use this mobile for at least 2 more years, so disabled apps, and location. finally, after two months found a solution in the mobile freedom group to remove the google apps.
Now it’s don’t required to unlock the bootloader and flash, in fact, this can be done in minimum steps. I checked on my android(Vivo) and it worked. All we need is the phone to allow adb access. adb will give permissions to remove apps.
Let’s stop feeding these surveillance capitalism monsters. Privacy will only be possible with free(dom) software. And Privacy is a collective effort and not a individual interest. If you would like remove pre-installed apps in your Android phone? Do check “Freesoftware Movement of India” launched a campaign to De-googlify your android mobiles.