Why are Australia ' s whites not as white as South Africa ' s whites ? <| sep |> congratulations better later than never but 1 year isnt too late ? <| sep |> probably because the post was a random video , i mean , no explanation , no background hey im a newold player with juri , here is this video , tell me what do you thinkThe quality is a bit low and i love all the William Gibson books but his name is not necessary for you intro , is a video about you , bear with my English by no means i want to be rude <| sep |> Who ? Shelby <| sep |> OK I ' ve decided how I ' m going to approach this and it ' s going to be characterized as Good newsBad news although ultimately , in the hands of a sensible user , the good news far outweighs the bad . I think you sound like a sensible user so here ' s the deal . From your question I think you ' ve gotten the hint that in many casesand it ' s cloudy here because of how many devices are from nonGoogle third parties that oftentimes , the default privacy and security settings on Android phones are less sane than the default privacy and security settings on iPhones . That ' s mostly true , just being honest , and that ' s the bad news . The good news is that it ' s definitely not necessarily true , while Android phones are not uniformly well configured they are pretty much all extensively configurable , which means that if you make a few good decisions early on , you can probably have an even more private , even more secureunder average circumstances device than the iPhone . Get the Right DeviceGetting this out of the way I hate throwing money at a problem . I ' d like a 50 dollar phone that we can do all this with , complete with verified boot keys under user controlLike the Google P i x e l i m p r o b a b l e h a r d e n i n g androidsecurityandprivacy and p h o n e p r o t o t y p e g o o g l e h ostilityandroidopensource lines mentioned in these articles , or the USB Armory from the Inverse Path guys , but that just isn ' t out there yet . Vanilla Nexus , and in general , phones close to stock AOSP with common chipsets and little firmware , are the sanest choices for people attempting to mod an Android phone for added security . DiskData EncryptionLet ' s start with Disk and File Encryption . Bad news We need to make sure that it ' s turned on . Good news This is easy . Open the launcher , go to settings , go to security , set a lockscreen passphrase , select encrypt device and wait . On a Nexus , this might be set up automatically . More good news Thanks to Android ' s tolerance for experimentation , you have some neat options for hardening it . Next step , is to separate the Disk Encryption password from the Lock Screen password , so a shouldersurfer can ' t just watch you put it in and steal your phone later . You can do that with droid . orgrepositorybrowse ? fdfilterlockampfdidcom . kibab . android . EncPassChangerampfdpage 2 . In order to make sure that the phone turns off if someone attempts to log in by bruteforcing the password , you can use this appdroid . orgrepositorybrowse ? fdfilterlockampfdidnet . zygotelabs . lockerampfdpage 3 , and to make sure that somebody can ' t just swipe it out of your hands fast you can use thisdroid . orgrepositorybrowse ? fdfilterlockampfdidnet . syntaxblitz . plucklockampfdpage 4 . And now you have a more hardened lockscreen and an encrypted disk for securing data at rest when the device is powered off . Next , we should take measures to secure our files and apps when the device is on but the files and apps are not in use . To lock our apps we can use this programdroid . orgrepositorybrowse ? fdidcom . gueei . applocker , but it has some issues on AOSP 5 . 0 so make sure to test it on your device . Last thing you needdeserved to have on a default setup is an encrypted memo pad . I use droid . orgrepositorybrowse ? f dfilternotepadampfdidinfo . guardianproject . notepadbotUse an Aftermarket ROM , but Understand It ! OK , onto a little more controversial thing , but frankly I hope to cut to the chase . Operating System trustworthiness . Here ' s the thing about Google , I ' m sure you ' ve heard it before but it bears repeating , you , more specifically your information , is how they monetize their services . You give them information , they process it and use it to show you ads , people buy ads . They pay people to get them that information by giving them a cut of the ads . Therefore , if you are using Google services , you are being trackedby arguably the best in the business . What ' s more , the software on your phone is shipped by nature in a binary form , and if you wanted to check whether it corresponds to the same software compiled by the same compiler by removing nondeterministic componentsbuilds . o r g d o c s deterministicbuildsystems and comparing the checksums of the resultant binaries you ' d still have no way of reliably extracting the original binary for comparison ! Which makes it hard for me to trust the socalled Stock ROM ' s and piques an interest in the aftermarket . Enter CyanogenMod , Replicant , OmniROM , Guardian ROM , and finally CopperheadOSEDIT Which has advanced features I should mention related to NonExecutable Pages and Address Space Layout Randomization , making memory much harder to exploit . I strongly advocate for the use of thirdparty ROM ' s on the grounds of my personal Software Freedom , but much like switching to GNULinux doesn ' t automatically give you absolute privacy and security , but it can enable you to have better , switching to an aftermarket ROM can give you better privacy and security but it essentially means you Trust the aftermarket work of CyanogenMod and co . on the AOSP base . Which I personally do , at least more than I trust the crap that comes on my phones . Transmission EncryptionNow for TextingInstant Messaging . On the iPhone , iMessage is pretty good at what it does . I am inclined to take Apple at their word when they say that they cannot access the content of iMessages directlyAlthough I have some questions about their CA after reading i n n e r w orkingsofimessagesecurity , I think it ' s at least MITM able . But the bad news is that iMessage is N o n F r e e a pplepleasesetimessagefree software and it ' s one of the cases of NonFree softwaresw . en . html where it pretty clearly matters . And what ' s more , even if the protocol were open and services could federate with it , it ' s still no guarantee that Apple would allow your messages in particular to get through . Which means that the easy , transparent encryption of messages from iPhone to iPhone will obviously no longer be available to you . Good news , you already use WhatsApp , which is what everybody on Android uses anyway , and WhatsApp uses the OMEMO protocol which has great properties for your privacy . I ' d also take a look at Signal , obviously and potentially a peertopeer messenger like or , these use peertopeer networks to negotiate direct connections between peers without the assistance of a utility provider for addressing , which gives some resilience in the face of various types of outages . This mostly covers voice too , at least in terms of EndtoEnd encryption . Oh look . Do I need to say all the things that are funny about this right now ? privacy . htmlEMailBad news Email . Good news It ' s never too late to learn PGP ? PGP is easier than ever , especially on Android ? At least EMail is Federated ? It ' s not Facebook ? Lol but seriously , this program here , Pretty Easy Privacydroid . orgrepositorybrowse ? fdfilterprivacyampfdidpep . android . k 9 is a pretty impressive fork of K 9 mail which makes endtoend encryption of emails startlingly easy compared to what it has been in the past . If you can configure one email client , you can configure PEP .