Last week we talked about the budding localist renaissance in America.
This week let’s talk about rugged independence at the individual level. And given that we’re living fully in the Information Age now, we have to start with digital sovereignty.
It all starts with our smart phone.
If we stop to think about it – the smart phone is possibly the most amazing device ever created. Its functionality is almost endless.
In fact, actual phone calls are probably their least-used feature. I would wager that most of us use other applications on our phone far more often than we use it to make calls.
I love that the smart phone allows us to access the accumulated store of human knowledge on demand. And from most anywhere in the world.
But there is a dark side…
Every smart phone needs an operating system to make it work. For iPhones, the operating system is Apple iOS. For most other phones, the operating system is Google’s Android.
99% of the world’s smart phones run one of these two operating systems. But did you know that these systems send data back to Apple and Google every four and a half minutes, on average?
So every phone running iOS or Android reports back to headquarters around 13 times an hour. Studies show that the iPhone only sends 52 kilobytes (KB) of data back to Apple every twelve hours. Meanwhile, Android phones send roughly 1 megabyte (MB) worth of data back to Google in that same time frame.
All this data is linked to each phone’s unique identifying information as well as its IP address and its geolocation. That means this data ties back to each of us. And our phones send it all back to Apple and Google regardless of what privacy settings we’ve chosen.
By the way, we’re just talking about data collected by the operating system here.
Most of the apps we download also come with trackers attached. And those trackers collect even more data on our preferences, habits, and activities.
And then there are the wireless carriers…
Most phones today use the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM). This system allows us to carry our cell service information on Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) cards. These SIM cards are what allow us to transfer our phone number every time we get a new phone.
This system requires our phones to reveal our identity to the cellular network we use. That’s how the network knows to route calls to the right person’s phone.
Here’s the thing so many don’t think about… this system also provides wireless carriers with the data we create on their network. That’s our phone calls and our Short Message Service (SMS) text messages.
A study conducted in 2011 shows that wireless carriers:
- Store our call detail records for 2-7 years, and possibly indefinitely.
- Store our cell phone tower usage data for at least one year, and possibly indefinitely.
- Store our text message data for 1-7 years.
- Keep our IP sessions for up to one year on a rolling basis.
Put it all together and our smart phones broadcast a mountain of information about us.
That information is stored in centralized databases. And we have no control over what happens to it from there.
Fortunately, there’s an elegant answer for those who would like to reclaim digital sovereignty. We can ditch the Big Tech operating systems for an open source alternative.
Believe it or not, there are quite a few alternatives available. I’ve tested a few of them, and I’ve found GrapheneOS to be the best. It’s very easy to use – it works just like our iPhones and Androids.
The difference is, GrapheneOS does not call back home with our data like iOS and Android do. Indeed, it doesn’t even have a home to call back to.
What’s more, Graphene allows us to access open source app stores. And it turns out there are open source alternatives to virtually every app we use. Most of these do not track and harvest our data like their cousins in Apple’s App Store and the Google Play store.
Whether it’s the weather app, the navigational app, the voice memo app… even the calculator app – they each come with trackers attached in iOS and Android systems. But we can find non-tracking alternatives for all of them on Graphene.
We know this because the open source app stores list every third-party tracker attached to each app available. That allows us to compare open source apps with their mainstream alternatives.
For example, popular navigation app Waze comes with three trackers. They are Google CrashLytics, Google AdMob, and Google Firebase Analytics. Meanwhile, the open source alternative OsmAnd+ comes with no trackers.
Let’s look at an even more egregious example…
The popular Weather Channel app comes with 14 trackers. Fourteen! Yet the open source alternative Breezy Weather doesn’t have any trackers attached to it.
So switching to GrapheneOS affords us full control over our data. We can use apps that do not track us. That allows us to reclaim privacy and digital sovereignty.
And we can do this without having to give up any functionality we currently enjoy. There are better alternatives for everything.
Shoot – there’s even an open source alternative to YouTube. It’s called New Pipe. And it allows users to view and download any video that’s been uploaded to YouTube.
Of course this still leaves us with the wireless carriers and the data we provide them by using their towers…
The simple answer here is to use our home Wi-Fi network whenever possible. Then we can use apps like Signal and Jitsi Meet to make phone calls and send text messages. Doing so keeps our data off of the carrier’s network.
But what about when we’re traveling and Wi-Fi isn’t available? There’s a solution worth considering here also.
We know that AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile are the big wireless carriers here in the US. They are the companies who build and manage our wireless networks.
Well, it turns out that there are also private mobile service providers who license access to the big carriers’ networks. These are small companies that sell cellular service plans – just like the big guys. But the best of them implement much stronger security measures. Efani stands out here.
If we move our cell service to a company like Efani, nothing changes with regard to our cell coverage. Because we’re still connecting to the same towers as before.
That means the carriers still get the data we produce over their network. They still see the calls we make and the SMS text messages we send.
The difference is, they can’t automatically tie this data back to us. Because we don’t have an account with them anymore.
For all they know, someone else could be using our old number. Or we can get a new number after switching to Efani to add another layer between us and the carriers.
Now, I don’t mean to imply that we can use the cellular networks anonymously. We can’t. Because our cellular data is still linked to us within Efani’s system.
But Efani uses strong security protocols to safeguard customer data. This provides for a much greater degree of privacy. Not perfect privacy. But much better than what we had before.
So to sum up, it’s not hard to reclaim our digital sovereignty today.
We just have to opt out of Big Tech systems. And we can do that by switching to a phone running GrapheneOS and by moving our cellular service to a company like Efani.
Tomorrow we’ll look at how we can harden our privacy and security even more utilizing our home network.
-Joe Withrow
P.S. If you would like to learn more about GrapheneOS, the folks at Above Phone make everything turn-key. You can get more information at: https://abovephone.com/.