Comments by "Cestarian Inhabitant" (@cestarianinhabitant5898) on "What it's like to use a De-Googled phone in real life? (Q&A of concerns)" video.

@cryptotrader2779 Ah, the chinese models. Then again, you never know about all the other stuff it comes preinstalled with instead of google, so it's a bit of an unknown tradeoff.
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I don't think you can buy a google-less phone, at least they are extremely hard to find. The most promising one for a while has been Librem 5 though, but it's availability is a bit scarce as it's release keeps getting delayed.
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@cryptotrader2779 I kinda agree with that actually, I'm a lot less worried about what the Chinese do with my data than what the Americans do with it. There is no such thing as 100%, although you can audit the code (since AOSP is open source; you can read the code directly and review it to see if it has any backdoors, before compiling it for your phone and installing it; but for phones in particular it requires some fairly extensive know-how, as opposed to PCs where it's a lot easier to ensure compatibility; since phones are all different but PCs are all more or less the same) There's also of course writing your own operating system yourself. But whether you audit the code, or make your own, there's on circumventing the possibility that you might still become a victim of direct hacking, even if you avoid the major data collection initiatives. There's also always the possibility of human error where you make an oopsie and install an app that comes with some unwanted bonuses.
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This was a really good video man.
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