I'm Only Renting Access To My Phone 2024-09-24
I run GrapheneOS on my phone. I generally like it, but I do not like some of the design decisions. Recently I bumped up against one of those design decisions. I think it would be nice if I could set my phone up to check a DNS record or web site every ten minutes. Then, if it discovers a particular condition (such as my DNS record resolving to 127.0.0.2) then it would:
- Record whether or not the GPS is currently turned on
- Turn on the GPS if necessary
- Wait for a bit so the GPS can find some satellites
- Get the phone's current GPS coordinates
- Send me the coordinates via XMPP or email
- Return the GPS to its original state if necessary
Google (and I assume Apple) already have something in place that does this. I would prefer to do this on my own without having to chare my location (as well as date/time info) with some wanker corporation that'll just sell it to other corporations or government/cops. As it turns out, this isn't a thing. There are some applications that supposedly do this, but [at least on GrapheneOS] those can be easily defeated by just rebooting the phone. It takes just three seconds to hold in the power button, and press "reboot"... then my GPS tattler is disabled, and won't start up again until the phone is unlocked which of course I do not want if my phone is lost or stolen.
Phones are poopemoji!If I could install generic Linux on my phone that would help, but of course that has its own set of problems. I thought that maybe I could just use my phone as a wifi hotspot and carry around a small netbook as my device for running apps, but that isn't going to last. Who wants to carry around two devices long term? Let alone one of them being a netbook. Besides, how would notifications work on a netbook? I also wondered if I could use a small Atom based tablet that had Linux on it... but even that is going to be a serious pain long term. Any device that "fits in my hand" and runs applications is pretty much currently bound to be running an OS that either shares lots of information about me or has some annoying limitations. At this point I'd be better off just waltzing around with a laptop in a backpack. :-(