I’m not an expert on Xiaomi, but if you take your time to type that on the search engine, you will find a lot of experts about different topics about it.

Sorry, I got confused too, what you are asking can be found if you go to a search engine and type “xiaomi spyware”. Xiaomi is just a Chinese company, don’t expect them to care about privacy, they don’t see that as a right of their users, and they do what Chinese government wants. Same with any USA product, by law they are enforced to do and not talk about it.

• All electronic devices (all chips in computers, cars, smartphones and more stuff every time) are build with resources extracted from “not ethical” places which means slavery, mafias, interests like this war that Putin is doing (wars are about resources). They extract those resources at very cheap cost, the factory is normally also on china because it’s cheaper the transport than paying a decent salary.
• The process to make chips also requires to consume a lot of resources to build them. (like a lot and a lot of water to clean them perfectly)
• Those devices normally comes with spyware often used to spy you. And we all know what they do with the data they collect, they know how to manipulate us and prevent any riot or create it. They own the media, they own your data and they have all the tools to wash people brains with nationalism and creating conflicts to keep people distracted, the same as giving us the perfect jobs to waste our time so we don’t have that time to protest for our rights or for those bad stuff they are doing.

That’s my point of view, you want a more deep detail.

I already said Fairphone.

For example, with a ethical OS would be https://murena.com/shop/smartphones/brand-new/murena-fairphone-4-fr/

This is mostly in Europe as it gets or got subventions from Europe. Those smartphones are expensive for the specs they have but that’s because they are paying fairly the resources and manufacturing.

If you want to know more about the smartphone: https://www.fairphone.com/

The OS is open source, a project to help people to get privacy easily. They even have Tor network built in. https://e.foundation/e-os/ https://gitlab.e.foundation/e/os/releases/-/releases

Xiaomi isn’t very ethical. Fairphone will do it better with their fair trade. If you don’t have the money, you can change your OS or get a second hand smartphone and help the environment and combat the slavery work. At least with smartphone we can do it.

It’s funny to see Mac users wants privacy.

The good thing about this is that it is super easy to repair and replaced parts. I think this started with European founding, so it’s basically on Europe as not many people cares about ethical manufacturing, most people want cheap 200 euros china phones. The US is mainly capitalist looking to bother other countries to extract their resources at the lowest cost, so it would make sense that Fairphone isn’t there.

Not deGoogled, Fairphone are phones build with ethical workers, compared to the cheap phones made in China and resources extracted by forcing kids to work on mines. You can deGoogle them later with any other OS you like most.

For something ethical and privacy respectful, I would go to Fairphone + /e/ project. https://esolutions.shop/shop/murena-fairphone-4-eu/

FireDragon is a fork from LibreWolf which is another fork from Firefox.

What I was saying is that I only use my desktop to browse internet, the app Portmaster also blocks trackers and everything AdBlock or PiHole do so if I go outside with my laptop it still works, on Android the same thing, if I go on phone data this AdBlock or PiHole will not work, I can still use other solutions, but I don’t really do anything on phone to care about trackers or ads, I neither have Google on my android.

So if I setup this DNS service on my own house LAN just for a desktop device… my Phone or Laptop which I only use when I’m outside will still have no protection, so I better have my own blocker on my localhost instead of my LAN and no need to run extra servers at home for just a desktop.

And I think if I wanted to do it, I would use a OpenWrt package to run it on my own router instead of a docker service. https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/services/ad-blocking

I only have Linux and I only use phone when I’m outside… I never neither have any ad issue on phone because I don’t really use it at all… I never liked services like that and PiHole as I could route all my traffic over VPN and skip LAN DNS. And if I go with my laptop to another house or to work, it would still work.

I always thought this kind of tools are useless, it’s better to have an ad block on your own PC, so you can use different DNS, VPN tunnels or even leaving home and still have this protection. For me the best is https://safing.io/portmaster/ which is free and open source, if you want also VPN you can pay the membership, but they are still on beta.

Maybe just use the browser and any instance of https://redirect.invidious.io/ , should be the same as a app.

Russia often lies

USA also lies on a way much worse. -> https://redirect.invidious.io/watch?v=D5xJuyrUIIA

This is a film that explains how they did with Afghanistan -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_Lake_(film) Basically USA created the Talibans, without them Taliban would not exist.

I’m neither saying Russia is right, Russia is also a bad country (all of them are just some are worse than others), they just aren’t invading south America just to get closer to USA.

As far as I know, NATO and USA has been and still hiring mercenaries to mess up and make conflicts near Russia frontiers. USA is the country that has been in war more than the 95% of the existence, did criminal wars and a war fanatic. I doubt Russia will use the force to invade Ukraine, makes no sense, instead war/force they would go for pro-russians politics on Ukraine using “democracy” rules.

I don’t think they will do worse than USA/NATO.

I feel a bit repetitive but any KDE distro like manjaro already gives you a nice and working interface, I think it’s the same just KDE has more options, you have a search bar to find the options easily which gnome don’t have so KDE could be easier than gnome to find a option too. If you don’t want to customize your desktop environment you will not do even if it’s KDE, LXDE, XFCE, Gnome… and any desktop environment… for example, on my laptop I have KDE with just a blank bar on the top with the icons system try + apps opened. Nothing more… I use shortcuts to open rofi to open apps and more shortcuts to change between workspaces, it is more simple and fast than Gnome.

I think you are right, Telegram is better, if you want a end to end chat just start a “secret chat” and you will get it. There is more features on Telegram but I would still use another chat app for personal conversations that respects the privacy like matrix.org, you can still use Telegram for your groups and likes like as you post on Lemmy or any other forum.

That’s why I changed to another provider, they claim to be private but they are developing other features like VPN, calendar and more instead making a app that works without google push like tutanota has. Not that hard to make, they just didn’t made it ungoogled. I don’t trust them.