Summary: My father, who has over 30 compromised accounts, tells me not to install Ironfox (aka one of the most secure browsers for Android) and F-Droid.

Background: I discovered that my father has a phone with LineageOS and asked if I could use it. He said yes because he no longer used it.

Today I started using it, saw what it was like, and it wasn’t much different from Android.

I was having some trouble putting some songs on that phone, so I asked him for help.

He went to the Google Play Store and installed Files by Google after logging into my account.

My account has parental controls, so that phone had parental controls too.

I was supposed to use that phone maybe to use once or twice a month and see what a phone without Google services was like (which I couldn’t disable now because it had parental controls).

So, after finding out what that phone had become, I tried to do a factory reset, but I couldn’t.

Then (somehow) I managed to convince my parents to remove the parental controls, but my dad started saying, “Don’t be surprised if your information ends up in strange places because you installed browsers from outside the Play Store (in this case, it was Cromite and Ironfox) and for running FTP servers (which I was only using to transfer some music I had on another site).”

Sorry for the long text 😅

  • ApertureUA@lemmy.today
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    13 hours ago

    What are you actually broadcasting while doing so? That you are using KDE Connect?

    That + device name which is probably pretty unique. Chinese routers scrape all of that. IIRC mDNS is actually disabled on Linux for now because it was conflicting with Avahi which broke some more stuff.

    do not use KDE Connect on other networks

    Last time I used it, I don’t recall a toggle for that in either the Linux or the Android clients.

    Edit: what alternative device discovery solution could be used by KDE Connect to make it more private on untrusted ntetworks?

    Exactly as it is right now but on a whitelist.

    Offtopic but I am really annoyed by how many custom ROMs (especially LineageOS) disable MAC randomization at build time and make zero mention of it on the wiki/forum/whatever page. That’s just as important.