I'm outside the US. I brought several broken Pixels Pros & fixed them with Chinese parts. I run GrapheneOS on all of them. None of my money went to Google. I even sold one with GrapheneOS still installed & the buyer understood what that meant.

You don't need to trust ungoogled phones, you just need to trust the forensic analysis, cyber security reports & new patches that point towards a cryptographically safe environment.

I hate Google as much as any of you Lemmies but there are ways. Plenty.

Ah y antes de que digan mamadas de privilegio y así... gano en axolopezones y estoy a la mitad entre bajos ingresos y pobreza 🫠

Grapheme runs tests on googles firmware regularly.

If it was actively doing something it shouldnt, they'd notice.

You could argue there could be something hidden in the firmware for use by the state when they REALLY REALLY REALLY want to get into something, and are willing to blow a good backdoor on it. But that's also something you deal with on any modern PC, unless you wanna party like its 2011 and run an old FX-Series AMD chip, or a librebooted machine with ME Cleaner. (See Intel ME/AMD PSP)