this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024
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Showerthoughts
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I have considered getting a burner phone that I pay for in cash only, having it utterly unconnected from my real life, and turned off and stored in a Faraday wallet when not in use just so I can use the 'digital coupons' that food retailers keep pushing. I use a loyalty card because all they get from that is my buying habits--groceries--plus an address. But access to my phone? Absolutely not.
I tried this. I bought a phone with cash, bought a prepaid SIM with cash and a google play card with cash.
Used a throwaway email address, and I could not get the play credit into the account.
I even opened a support ticket with google and they could not help.
I am an IT professional and quite adept at navigating technical bureaucracy and wasn't able to do it completely anonymously.
My guess (and it's just a guess, i could be very wrong) is there is some internal, undocumented check that the account has been tied to a real person before it allows credit onto the play store.
If someone has had success doing this I'd be quite interested in hearing about their experience.
But what if I don't want credit in the Play store? What if I want to use the Graphene OS, and side load everything?
Well that may work for you. My goal was slightly different. I needed official apps for work. My goal was to have a work phone that was completely disconnected from my private life. Graphene and sideloaded app would not have worked for me.