I am talking about libraries that offload app functions so that the devs don’t have to do everything from scratch. The apps will not function without it. That will work for apps that don’t rely on those libraries, like a calculator, but if you do use apps that do, you have to choose function vs privacy.

How much data you can control vs how much you will lose is a personal decision, but I bet a lot of people going for privacy do not realize how little they get for the functionality they give up ;)

For example, I don’t have a ring camera, but enough of my neighbors do so I don’t gain much privacy there. I use add blocker in my browser, but I am still easy to profile due to canvas, browser window size, time if day, etc. I don’t have a new car so my car doesn’t have cellular uplink, but a third party manages the license plate readers and traffic light cameras for the city and they can sell that data to anyone.

I am talking about libraries that offload app functions so that the devs don’t have to do everything from scratch. The apps will not function without it. That will work for apps that don’t rely on those libraries, like a calculator, but if you do use apps that do, you have to choose function vs privacy.

How much data you can control vs how much you will lose is a personal decision, but I bet a lot of people going for privacy do not realize how little they get for the functionality they give up ;)

For example, I don’t have a ring camera, but enough of my neighbors do so I don’t gain much privacy there. I use add blocked in my browser, but I am still easy to profile due to canvas, browser window size, time if day, etc. I don’t have a new car so my car doesn’t have cellular uplink, but a third party manages the license plate readers and traffic light cameras for the city and they can sell that data to anyone.

For privacy, I thought about running a de googled custom ROM. Then I did some risk assessments of common apps and realized that every app relies on multiple libraries and these libraries all have telemetry. Even major apps that you would think kick down their user data so bit even consider the data being hovered up by the libraries.

This means that there are probably 20+ data agrogators constantly pulling your data unless you don’t install a single app on your phone. Next option is a dumb phone, but even the “dumb phones” at the store are just Android with a locked down UI.

I consider it a lost cause at this point.

If you want privacy, buy some land in the mountains, put a big tarp over it, and never leave. :(

If you want more control over the OS to do things that users usually can’t do, than it makes sense to root.

I should give useful context though.

When you connect to a server, you send traffic to an IP address. That is like a street address with a letter. But when you send a letter in the mail, more than one person could live at a house, so you also include a name (or port number when sending to one service such as web traffic to a server that does many things). Usually that name corresponds to a person living there, like if you send a letter to John even though Sarah also lives there.

That is usually how it works, but not always. John and Sarah may have agreed that all letters should be named backwards, so John opens all letters to the name Sarah, and Sarah opens all letters to the name John. This would confuse anyone trying to send a letter to John unless John told them to use the name Sarah when sending a letter. Both could also agree that if a letter shows up for Bob, Sarah should open those as well (only Sarah’s best friend would know to use the name Bob).

These exceptions are usually people either trying to obfuscate what is running on a port to pretend to be something different, it trying to make it hard to find the port associated with the server.

Almost true. Port 80 is usually used for unencrypted web traffic. But anything can be ran on any port. Standards are standards, not requirements.

You can run https, ftp, virus communication, DNS, or anything else on port 80. People trying to connect to it might get confused though.