On Fri, Apr 04, 2014 at 12:21:11PM -0700, Keith Lofstrom wrote: > I'm behind the curve on smartphones. I don't want to be in a walled > garden (iPhone) or use apps that collect data on me (Android).
Assuming you trust the open source side of Android, it is possible to avoid the spyware. You probably won't achieve that without going the third-party ROM route, though (Cyanogenmod, etc.). And you'll have to forego most of Google's apps, as they're doing their best to close off all of the shiny parts of Android, replacing what were once open source apps with proprietary replacements. Happily, there is no requirement to have any of those apps installed on a device for it to be fully functional (i.e., it'll work just fine without Google Play). https://source.android.com/ http://www.cyanogenmod.org/about There is free and open source software available for Android. The community is, sadly, quite small, though (especially compared to what we enjoy in the Linux world). The F-Droid project is making a good effort to bring easily-installable open source apps to Android, and its maintainers appear suitably concerned about security and privacy issues. https://f-droid.org/ -- Paul Mullen _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
