"After all the recent NSA revelations, it’s been even more important to use Free Software on our mobile phones. Let me express this in another way: We should be very careful about what software we use on a device that is always on and in our pocket 24h a day. Starting from the very basic thing that makes our smartphone operate, it seems that we don’t have many options. So if you are using Iphone or Windows Phone, let me remind you that both of these companies are in the infamous NSA slides for giving access to users private data. So this post is about Android and my current setup of running only Free Software on my smartphone. I know what you are thinking.. that Google is also part of NSA’s “special friends”. Android is self-defined as an “Open Source Platform” (AOSP), and pretty much it is since it’s released under a mix of Apache and GPL license (although mostly developed behind closed doors). But this isn’t what you get when you buy a smartphone. Your device will certainly have preinstalled all of the Google’s proprietary stuff (gmail, play, etc) and probably manufacturer and/or vendor applications. Things that you have no idea what they do, besides their “normal” functionality, because we don’t have the code to look at."

— nikos.roussos | Free Your Android

(Source: roussos.cc)