I have speculated about how I intend to use my Librem 5 when it arrives and wanted to see what others think about some of my ideas.
Your Librem 5 gives you an opportunity to start over when it comes to your privacy and your boundaries. I plan to move slowly and methodically, by carrying both my Librem 5 and my Android phone with me at the same time for quite a while. The Android phone will be my daily driver at first while my L5 will be about what is important to me in my life. Any ideal that I can attain with privacy and creativity will go in to the L5. Any compromises will stay with my Android phone. For example, I’ll have Mastodon on my L5, and Twitter on my Android phone. I’ll do my banking on the Android phone while experimenting to see how much of my banking can be done using crypto-currencies from my L5. I’ll do what I can to migrate everything to my L5, but not if I have to compromise on privacy or being an advertising target. Eventually, maybe I’ll find good enough methods and software on my L5, to simply abandon my Android phone completely.
Technically, we here on this forum could establish friendships (Facebook types of friends) and business relationships (chamber of commerce type stuff), to re-write how we interact with the rest of the world. If the group gets big enough and a bank wants our business (for example), they’ll have to adapt to meet our needs (safe banking on my L5) or go elsewhere. The idea is to block out all of the surveilance capitalism and to build something different and more friendly, with only relationships that respect our privacy. So we start small with just ourselves as individuals. With the right tools and eco-systems, my existing personal friends may join me there. Eventually, that will be the easiest way to reach me.
They key to this is stop using the “WEB”, because a “web” is connected with a myriad of links, for privacy, you have to start using a “COCOON”.
It is made if the same stuff, so it should work right?
(Now that I used the word “cocoon”, someone’s going to do something with it market it!)
Indeed, I’ve been thinking in the same way, but with Pinephone instead of Android. Qubes OS gave me those ideas, because this system allows to separate your digital life into independent domains (e.g., random browsing, email, social networks) based on virtual machines. I think that the domain devoted to social networks and semi-random browsing could correspond to Pinephone, while Librem 5 is for the most personal staff, where browsing is exclusively done with Noscript (or LibreJS), HTTPS Everywhere (with “only-https” option) and Privacy Badger. However in Qubes I have special VMs for networking and passwords making it much more secure, but not on the phones. I probably have to make a comrpomise in the security if I go in this direction.
One challenge with starting over is how to deal with giving your mobile number to companies since it immediately becomes paired with other information about you and is then exploited for other’s commercial gain. As an experiment, I have set up an sms number (of course, it costs me extra) with internet phone service provider. A friend recommended to me Call Centric. It is very easy to cancel and create new sms numbers so it is in principle possible to limit the change the number often; however, the problem that I have not resolved is how to keep track of the places where I have given the number so that it is easy to update it once I have changed it.
But, for instance, one day in my amazon account suddenly appeared an ability to connect my account at my bank. At this point your private data has leaked out.