First lets talk about what is a “GhostPhone”, I have been seeing it a lot more lately and I want to clear somethings up. A “GhostPhone” is just a phone that has little to know regular trackers. As we all know Google (Android) and Apple (IOS), harvest most of the data we keep on our phones the then sell it off (That is how they make money off of you if you did not know). Well how do you make it so that neither of those companies harvest all that data that you willingly trade for some convenience. The answer is a de-googled phone also known as a GhostPhone.
Now let me say this, a GhostPhone wont stop all data being harvested from your phone it just makes it a lot easier to not just give it over all willy nilly. There are trade offs of course, such as bank apps probably will not work or work the way they were intended to be. As you see the banking apps actually call to the playstore to make sure there is nothing fishy going on.
Alright, now how do you create a GhostPhone, my own recommendations would be to start off by finding the right OS for you. I personally would go with GrapheneOS, this is a android based OS that has privacy in the forefront. The best phones to use to have GrapheneOS on are funny enough Pixel phones made by Google. You can find the link to GrapheneOS here. Alright you got yourself a pixel phone preferably a pixel 6 – 9. Now what? Simple, you go to the website and follow the instructions. I won’t go over those as they have made it very simple to follow along. What i will go over is what to do once you finally booted into GrapheneOS. You’ll a way to install apps. Well there is a very simple way you’ll open the web browser and go to F-Droid, this is an app store that is open source (which means you can go and read how it was made and bring up anything that might be wrong). From there if there are any apps you need from the original play store you can download Aurora store which is a playstore copy that allows you to download apps without being connected to a google account. Now that we have the basics what are some apps I would recommend downloading to keep yourself safe. I recommend the entire Proton app suite, they are like google but open source and privacy focused. Other apps I can recommend is Wasted (this app allows you to wipe the device from either a message, notification, if a usb get plugged in, etc). You will also need a messaging service to text friends, there is a variety of apps that do this but I would recommend Signal, these messaging apps to kinda suck because the other person also needs to have the app to talk to each other but it is much more secure than texting. I would also recommend mysudo this is a VOIP app that can give you numbers that you can use. I would make an account and buy the plus plan where you get 7 numbers which I would then use for different things. I would give these numbers out instead of my real number. With 7 different numbers you can have one for gaming, one for shopping, one for work, one for travel, etc. Once all that is done congrats you have made yourself a “GhostPhone”, now don’t just give your location to every app that asks for it. Be safe!
