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Joined 6 days ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2025

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  • By hiding the IMEI, the provider won’t be able to associate the device with me when I use it solely on public Wi-Fi such as in a café

    I think you’re a little confused. Connecting to Public Wifi (or any wifi), will not reveal IMEI, it does reveal your Wifi MAC Address, and if you have Bluetooth on, it will reveal your Bluetooth MAC Address, but will not reveal your IMEI (unless you have malware on your phone).

    In modern smartphones, including iOS, Android, and especially GrapheneOS, Wifi MAC addresses are spoofed by default, generating a random MAC address for each Wifi network. You can even go to Developer settings of Android to enable randomization for each different session of the same wifi network (or you can “forget” the network and reconnect and, from my testing, it would immediately change the MAC address for that network).

    Although, if you have iOS or Google’s Android, you can’t be sure if the companies themselves are tracking you, but but a privacy Android ROM (like GrapheneOS) with Wifi MAC randomization enabled should be very safe.

    Keep Airplane mode on so it stops connecting to cell towers.

    Though I’m still curious about:

    May I also ask how much information is carried to the second device by using hotspot? By this I meant the phone with IMEI will be able to know my device name, but what else? Will the phone with IMEI also be able to know the device model?

    Your device name and Wifi MAC address is revealed, so change the default “Google Pixel” to something else to hide the fact that it’s a Google Pixel. But, some wifi access points can detect your device model anyways. My Xfinity gateway will show my Phone’s name and what model of phone I have. So I’ll just assume that: Device Name, Device Model, and MAC (which is randomized) is known. Shouldn’t be that much of a privacy risk unless Google Pixels aren’t popular in your area. If there are a lot of Google Pixels around, they can’t prove it was your Google Pixel.


  • Is it a good enough solution for IMEI tracking to use an alternative device to provide a hotspot connection?

    What?

    So you wanna use another phone as a hotspot and connect your GrapheneOS Phone to it?

    I mean, what exactly do you mean by “IMEI Tracking”? Location?

    Well they won’t know the location of your GrapheneOS Phone, but they’ll still know the location of your alternate phone. Not sure what you’re trying to achieve here.










  • I doubt entrenched powers would let the mayor of the biggest US city actually do anything radical like what he campaigned for.

    Its called legislature.

    You’d need like progressives to win enough seats to get a majority in city council.

    If Bernie became President, he probably wouldn’t have gotten much of the progressive agenda done, just look at the composition of congress. You’d need 50 progressive senators and 218 progressive representatives, it’s a long shot. For NYC tho, that’s probably a bit easier, but still, its 26 progressive city council members needed. Basically 26 simultaneous campaigns + the Mayor’s Seat to actually transform the city.




  • Lol, btw my dad who is still a PRC Citizen had to download an app and install it via .apk, because the Google Play Store doesn’t have it, in order to apply for the Passport Renew in the app. Because (1) there is no Embassy in my city, and he’d have to travel 2-3 hours to get to the closest Embassey/Consulate and (2) since Covid, they made appointment process much difficult, and encourage online application instead.

    They have do like a face scan using the app. Very futuristic to not have to do it in person, but simultaneously very uncanny and creepy to have essentially the Embassy stepping inside your house with the camera and microphone permissions.

    I think he kept the app installed to check on the application progress, so the CCP could’ve technically heard the political debates about Taiwan and stuff in the house. So yea I’m probably on the watchlists of both PRC and USA for being a dissident, the two most powerful nations in the world doesn’t very like dissidents like me who hates authoritarians. Wonderful. If they every go after everyone, I literally have nowhere in the world that can escape from the tentacles of these both these authoritarians. But lucky I’m not that important, so so far, no agent of the government have come after me, yet.