Friday Nov 18:
I bought a Samsung tablet to
- Be able to download android apps (like opera and brave browsers which are not available on fire-os)
- Get away from appliances and devices having my phone number associated with web services. This is to stop tracking.
Grrrr…it has not been easy to install anything. I had to read articles about how to initialize a google ID to not use a phone number.
Sunday Nov 20 (A couple of days later)
Ok, the Google ID seems to have been worked out. I had to go to my phone and add a new google identity, but skipped adding the phone number to it. I then went to the tablet and initialized the tablet with the new google identity.
I plan to remove the identity from the phone soon. I hope the fact the tablet is logged onto the new identity means it will still exist even though the phone now will know nothing about it.
i skipped the Samsung login initialization on the tablet. WHY? Because Samsung wants to offer services surrounding syncing between tablet and phone. The whole reason I bought the tablet was to GET AWAY FROM APPLIANCES KNOWING MY PHONE NUMBER.
Brave, Audible, Kindle, Amazon, and PDF reader/editors are working on the tablet now.
Saturday night Google NUKED ALL MY PHONE NUMBERS OFF MY PHONE. You have to proceed very carefully.
This took some effort to recover. i had to call some cousins and ask for people’s phone numbers.
Google also refused to email to proton mail in europe in order to use proton as a backup email address for password recovery. They do not like people having privacy. Or – perhaps an evil government is interfering with routing to europe. there is a war going on after all.