Yesterday, someone at work showed me how he gets Starlink on his phone, direct to satellite. T-Mobile calls it T-Satellite. If you use T-Mobile, they can just turn it on for you. If you have another carrier, you just take your phone in to a T-Mobile store. They install a second SIM card in to your phone. If you only have one slot for a physical SIM card in your phone, then you have to get your carrier to switch your service with them to an e-SIM first. The T-Satellite service can not work on an e-SIM. If you don’t have a way to get two SIMs working on your phone (like is the case for the Librem 5), then the T-Satellite won’t work. He said that he gets more than text messaging. Data to run apps works too, even when no regular cell service is available. He said the free T-Satellite service is no longer available. He pays $5/month. But he is grandfathered in to that deal. The rest of us will pay $15/month. A satellite icon appears at the top of your screen when you’re connected to a satellite. It connects and disconnects (not a seamless connection) as the satellites hand your connection off to other satellites as they pass overhead.
I am currently re-evaluatibg my privacy strategy. I did an update on my GrapheneOS phone and in that process, lost the attestation required for banking apps to work. When you deal with the devil, even a little bit, the devil will stay in your life, at least a little bit, maybe a lot.
I think I’ll switch to carrying my Librem 5 or a dumb phone with no built-in GPS during the day, and maintain a phone with Google integrated in to it for only use at home. For banking and when on my WiFi, there is no hiding anyway. Hopefully, the bank can verify my identity anyway. So I’ll do all banking from home. During the day and when away from home, I’ll try to stay invisible, at least for location.
It is impossible to hide from Google and Apple. It’s not about what you do to try to maintain your privacy. What you do doesn’t matter at all when it comes to hiding from Google and Apple. Every friend and relative of yours has your name and phone number in their respective address books, which Google has access to. When Google verifies your identity, all they have to do is look at the address books of everyone in your life, and there you are every time. So you have a Librem 5 with Awsim. That’s fine. But Google still knows your email address and your Awsim phone number, whether you give it to them or not. If further proof of identity is needed, we all have family tree information online and the AI engines are hard at work. If Jim Doe and Jane Doe have a family tree that shows a son named John Doe, and if your name is John Doe and your parents Jim and Jane both have you listed in each of their respective Google Contacts lists, then guess what? Your identity has been verified, not to mention all of the matches with your cousins, aunts and uncles, grandparents, etc, if even a few of them have you listed in their Google Contacts list. Even only a first name is enough, if you have many first names that match. Most family members share common relative contact information freely within the family as within most families, the permission to share contact information about other families members is a given. Unless you keep your Awsim phone number secret from everyone (no exceptions) who knows you, then Google and Apple have it and they know exactly who it belongs to. From just this information alone, a whole dossier exists on every one of us…. Like it or not. So the question is: why do we even try to have privacy and anonymity? The only one who loses anything when you try to hide from Google is you, when your bank isn’t satisfied that you are you, because they use Google attestation while you are not fully cooperating with Google. So you can’t get in to your bank account. Google pays no price for that. Only you do. Google knows my network of friends and relatives better than I do, past the six degrees of separation. Google knows friends of friends of mine that I don’t even know about. So it’s not just that they know what my shopping habits are or who my friends are. They know better than I do, what the forces are that shape my individual world. What else is there to hide?
I don’t know anything about banking apps, but I figure anything I don’t give google that only I know is for the best. Not perfect, but I’m not prepared yet to accept that nothing I do helps at all. Not having many friends and relatives is finally a plus as well.