The trick is that, on my second Graphene phone I put it on Graphene from the start, never installed or used anything else on the device or even allowed it access to the internet. I also gave into the advice to try to avoid external apps whenever possible. I have a few odds and ends installed but not nearly as many as people have been trained to do for normalized stalkerware exploitation. Signal is my only continuous battery draining background app. I do everything in the vanadium browser like with Lemmy. The only other regular internet connected app is Pipe pipe and I do not use any scheduled background stuff with it.

I only allow WiFi data most of the time and my network is exclusive to my devices with a whitelist firewall on a dedicated device. Cookies and trackers are not just blocked by Ad Block on my network. I’m blocking tons of extra background nonsense everywhere on the internet, so these things never reach my devices.

For instance every time you see the social network icons at the bottom of a webpage, those are embedded links to those services hosting those images. You are actually visiting all of those places and retrieving those tiny images while giving them your fingerprinting information. They know every page you visited and how long it took between pages. All of that is tracked. Most pages try to use google static for fonts on their pages, which is doing the exact same thing. But, when the google static server is blocked the page will default to your system font and there is not any real difference unless they are using really odd special characters like rare symbols or super rare emojis in Unicode. Like I have almost all languages to the point of Egyptian hieroglyphs and cuneiform, so I never see bad characters in practice.

When I visit a website, I am only visiting the sever I whitelisted. It is a pain in the ass to manually whitelist everything I want to visit, but I have been doing it for years after some sketchy stuff happened while I was building breadboard computer stuff and downloading vintage hardware PDF datasheets from 3rd party sources. Anything I download is unable to dial out to any address unless it is whitelisted on my network. I can also write code that is sketchy and I don’t need to worry about it doing dumb stuff like nmap’ing the whole internet. Or like now playing with offline AI running on my hardware, I do not need to worry about a model agent doing something dumb, or nefarious stuff that may be hidden and undetectable in a fine tuned model.

Anyways, I don’t do it for the battery life, but the battery life is a bonus side effect. I also do not shop or make purchases on this device or network. This is for social, YT, and news stuff only. These are partitioned so I can take absolute control over my spending habits and break any direct link between these areas and purchase tracking. This partition stopped me from making frivolous purchases.

Graphene is just one part of my strategy, but an important one. Graphene does much to limit the background junk on Android’s zygote app preloading system that only really exists for stalkerware junk. It was supposed to be for faster app loading but the difference in time is far less than the speed of human persistence of vision.