Hey guys! I’m looking fot a new aripod and i just discovered that they collect A LOT of data actually. There is any TWS airpod that don’t collect a lot of data? How can i have more privacy with airpods?
I recently got the Fairbuds 2, and I absolutely love them!
“Wired wired wired”
Meanwhile phones: “3.5mm what now? Never heard of it.”
I’m not ditching Graphene to get a phone with more spyware to replace my headphones with wired to avoid the headphone spyware. Seems counterproductive.
Who are you concerned about the data going to? Intercepting a Bluetooth signal is not really a thing anymore. Your phone OS has plenty of ways to know what you’re listening to without Bluetooth itself being thr vector. If you use GrapheneOS and Linux, you’re good there. The headphones themselves aren’t going to have a Sim card that is phoning home.
So then you’re left with third party software being the attack vector. For this reason, I would not install headphone apps, and ESPECIALLY not earbuds that require connecting/registering to a third party account like Amazon Echo buds.
This unfortunately means no custom EQ. For my open ear headphones, I tried out my top 4 choices without downloading the app, and picked the best sounding & most comfortable pair. That happened to be the Nothing Ear Open. My over ear Sony XM4 headphones that I already own are amazing but needed EQ badly, so I installed the app on an old Android, tweaked the EQ, and it saved the EQ information to the headphones themselves. Not all headphones can do this, however.
You got a bunch of replies itt about different alternatives but not a lot dissecting what the problem is and what the feasible extent of the “solutions” are.
You asked for true wireless stereo airpods so I’m gonna assume you’re in the Apple world. If that’s so, I’m a privacy minded person who uses the old g2 airpods and has accepted the tradeoffs involved. When you need replacements the website therightpod.com is a fine place to go.
The airpods themselves arent really a huge vector for data collection, it’s the os that’s doing that. Apple is insane for telemetry because it’s how they find and fix bugs. The idea is to have a separate pathway for technical crash data to get to the qa and development people instead of relying on customer support for that. From the perspective of a developer, a support rep and a customer it’s a much better experience. You can turn a good portion of it off in settings.
True wireless earphones use Bluetooth. Bluetooth was never designed to be secure and has to support a large variety of mechanisms for pairing that are inherently insecure. Bluetooth must also support a truly enormous number of devices whose idea of a hardware shared secret is the Indian certificate authority “4”. Bluetooth cannot be “secure” and therefore cannot be private. The word is in scare quotes because there’s some cool stuff but people are constantly bypassing bt so how cool or safe some new method happens to be is up for analysis.
Don’t have conversations over Bluetooth that would implicate you. Don’t have conversations over a device connected to the known compromised cell network that would implicate you.
Actually i meant earphones. I realized airpods are a Iphone thing, so my bad.
No worries. All the same advice applies with the additional caveat that unless you’re on graphene you should trust an Android handset less than an Apple one.
You can’t get private tws headphones and even going wired isn’t any real solution because you’re sending the unencrypted signal up what amounts to an antenna in order to get it to your ears. And all the data collection is done on device so even if you’re using wired headphones you are still being telemetried.
If there’s a specific thing you’re concerned about or want to avoid, spell it out and I can try to help. I use graphene and ios daily.
I want to deliver minimal data as possible! I’m trying to ditch big tech and their data collection so i am focusing on privacy alternatives to eletronic devices. I am using a computer with Linux, going to buy new motorola with Graphene and now i want to find earphones tws that gives you a little bit of privacy.
If you’re worried about data collection your first step needs to be to get on either ios or graphene. You are already moving towards graphene so that’s good.
The problem you’re gonna run into with tws earbuds is the app. Each earbud has a whole ass little dsp in it which it needs because the sound is beamed to it as data and translated into analog audio before being sent to an amp and then to the little speaker in the earbud which excites your eardrum.
But in order to keep the timing right if you happen to have both in, they need to also communicate what frame of the mpeg audio stream they’re on and synchronize their output so you don’t have a very disorienting experience.
Now when you have the kind of muscle that lets you decode and synchronize playback between two speakers in real time you also have the computing power to apply the kind of “not just an eq” needed to get really quite nice sound quality out of a package the size of half a pinky finger.
Which is a huge deal because things the size of an earbud sounded like garbage 30 years ago for reasons of the laws of physics. The two ways to resolve that problem are using much more expensive designs and materials or throwing the equivalent of a pentium 4 at it. Take a wild guess which avenue the designers of the sort of tws earbuds you and I can afford went down.
If the maintainer of your phones os is the same as the manufacturer of the earbuds, they probably work great together and you probably don’t need any special software. If they’re not the same then the bespoke set of transforms applied to make the earbuds sound acceptable (or do noise cancelling, voice isolation, room tone compensation and a whole host of other stuff that headphones just fucking do nowadays) won’t be present unless you install the manufacturers special app.
Used to be you only had to worry about how much data your phones os is sending off, now you gotta worry about the middleware that makes your headphones work right too.
The problem with just not using the apps is everything is gonna sound like shit and you’re no longer able to trust what you see in reviews or other people’s experiences on the non review parts of the internet because they’re all using the app. So you can’t even trust other people when they say that some brand/product is good across whatever parameters define goodness for you and them.
You just gotta see what works for you and what can sound okay on graphene without some proprietary app and despite what probably everyone itt is saying, no one can help you make that choice in the slightest. If the shitty $20 Walmart ones work fine without the app and sound okay to you then accept a huge win and stop worrying about it.
If you want to be 100% sure no data is being collected by your headphones your nest bet is going to be going back to wired. I assume that is not an answer you want but anything that uses a Bluetooth connection can be used as a vector to collect data on you. The only thing I can think of is either having your data off while using them, but that’s probably just postponing the data collection. Do you have a source on what data is being collected? Would be much easier to find places you can help reduce the amount of data being collected.
From what i read they collect data based on their app, and the problem is that many earphones manufacturers oblige you to download it!
Best bet is to avoid any hardware that mandates an app. Those almost always siphon data in the background.
AirPods have data collection built into the OS. Only thing you can do is to use different headphones.
If you’re shopping for Bluetooth ones, skip the app. It’s guaranteed to have a bunch of data collection. But most of them will work fine with just a Bluetooth connection and you’re guaranteed safe. The apps are completely unnecessary.
