this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2025
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Privacy
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Genuinely curious here, I but what restrictions?
No mobile payments, a lot of apps have integrity check which means I can't really use them, no way to reset the unique device ID sent to apps so they can track you (why am I even using Graphene ๐?), slow device, annoying to set up things like carplay's android thingy...
I get it, but GrapheneOS is meant to "disallow" those things precisely because they invade our privacy.
If they really wanted privacy they wouldnโt just sandbox gplay services and would allow resetting advertising IDs and other unique identifiers sent to apps to track us
If you're referring to the com.android.adservices.api module, in the GrapheneOS discussion forums they clarify this: "This is an open source component of the Android Open Source Project providing an implementation of alternatives to tracking users for targeted advertising. It isn't enabled by default, doesn't use any Google services and is not a privacy issue in any way."
They also mention that: "GrapheneOS isn't going to enable these features since we don't have any reason to enable targeted advertising."
We all would love to be able to reset this, but we can't, plus it appears to be irrelevant to our privacy as long as we don't install Google Play Store and Google Play Services (which I have chosen to NOT install).
We can't reset of disable it because, and I quote: "However, the systems it provides are much better than the approaches preceding them based on identifiers. Google Play provides an optional advertising ID which can be regenerated or disabled but most other SDKs don't provide similar controls.", so it seems that, because I don't have the optional advertising ID that Google Play provides, I can't, nor do I need to, reset or delete the ID.
This is the link to that discussion: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/2156-why-theres-a-package-named-android-adservices-installed-out-of-the-box/10