So I got Fairphone 4, with /e/ os, a couple of days ago. When I connected it to my NextDNS I saw that it was trying to connect to some weird addresses, like every 5-10 minutes. I searched Internet a bit and found out that it was something with snapdragon cpu and location services. I travel a lot and use Organic Maps for navigation, so location was enabled almost all day on the phone. I turned off location services and connections stopped, and everything was fine for a couple of days.

Today I came home, checked logs in NextDNS and saw that phone started doing the same connections almost constantly even with location turned off.

Can I do something about this, other than allowing these connections? These connections are probably so numerous because they are getting blocked. If I allowed them, phone would maybe call home once in a couple of hours. I would rather not allow them, but I don’t want 20% of battery to be eaten by this.

  • MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 year ago

    I found a few links summarising this:

    On 4th and 5th generation Pixels (which use a Qualcomm baseband providing cellular, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GNSS in separate sandboxes), almanacs are downloaded from https://qualcomm.psds.grapheneos.org/xtra3Mgrbeji.bin which is a cache of Qualcomm’s data. Alternatively, the standard servers can be enabled in the Settings app which will use https://path1.xtracloud.net/xtra3Mgrbeji.bin, https://path2.xtracloud.net/xtra3Mgrbeji.bin and https://path3.xtracloud.net/xtra3Mgrbeji.bin. GrapheneOS improves the privacy of Qualcomm PSDS (XTRA) by removing the User-Agent header normally containing an SoC serial number (unique hardware identifier), random ID and information on the phone including manufacturer, brand and model. We also always fetch the most complete XTRA database variant (xtra3Mgrbeji.bin) instead of model/carrier/region dependent variants to avoid leaking a small amount of information based on the database variant.

    Note sure if e/OS/ has taken as much care as Graphene has to make the requests more private. Then again, they don’t claim to be the most private OS, just De-Googled.

    Edit: this is also a good read for further attempts to make your device more private: https://grapheneos.org/faq#other-connections