How we built the new Find My Device network with user security and privacy in mind
security.googleblog.com
Posted by Dave Kleidermacher, VP Engineering, Android Security and Privacy Keeping people safe and their data secure and private is a t...

I saw this on infinity for Reddit earlier, I don’t know if there’s a workaround for this or not.

  • onlinepersonaEnglish
    41·
    8 months ago

    If it’s hardware controlled, then the Graphene OS team would have to find a flaw in the hardware, or trust that when they tell the hardware to shut off, that it really does shut off, or find a way to verify that the hardware is really of. But even if they could tell the hardware to shut off, verify that it’s off, and then shut down, the hardware could turn back on after the software is off and the software would be none the wiser.

    The only way 2 ways anybody can be relatively sure this feature is off are:

    • pulling the battery:
      • good luck with that with phones that don’t have removable batteries
      • hopefully there won’t be a small backup battery to power this specific circuit
    • physically disconnecting this circuit from other circuits:
      • that might mean saying goodbye to bluetooth functionality on the phone

    The alternative is getting a linux phone with hardware that doesn’t have this feature.

    Anti Commercial-AI license

      • onlinepersonaEnglish
        31·
        8 months ago

        I hope linux phones will become more of a thing as they aren’t there yet IMO. But of course you can always get a second hand phone… forgot that option

        Anti Commercial-AI license

        • HelloHotel@lemm.ee
          1·
          8 months ago

          I hate that they don’t support them after a while, those with a locked bootloader wont even get a chance. It makes these phones junk from all the CVEs that are being found.

          • What old model would you recommend?
          • Is something like postmarketOS viable yet?
          • What phones are/will be effected?
          • Do existing phones planned for the program have the payload sitting there dormant or will the system updater (on googled android) need to download the payload?