My Testimony
by Thomas
I’ve been a Mac user for about 30 years. I was deep in the Apple ecosystem: iPhone, Apple Watch, MacBook, iCloud, iMessage, Keychain… all of it. That’s the point, Apple doesn’t just sell you a phone, it sells you a dependency. Every convenience feature is another hook: your entire system backs up to iCloud, your passwords live in Keychain, your messages are tied to an Apple ID, your Apple 2FA is device dependent, and your Apple Card is only really useful on your iPhone. By the time you decide to leave, you’ve got a dozen or more threads to unwind and you’ve been conditioned to think that technology has to be frictionless. I didn’t want to admit that I wasn’t the king of my tech empire, and that I was the slave of Big Tech – actually paying them to spy on me and commodify my private life.
The first step was auditing all of it. Where does all my data actually live? What services am I authenticated into through Apple ID or Google? What’s the exit path for each one? Passwords stored in Keychain need to be moved to a cross-platform manager before you touch anything else. Photos and other data need to be exported and re-imported somewhere else or a self-hosted solution. Contacts and calendars need to be exported as .vcf and .ics files and migrated to a new provider. None of this is hard, but it has to happen in the right order or you lock yourself out of things. Mark37 has a best-in-class migration plan that starts with this crucial step and saves you from a lengthy recovery process from moving too quickly.
The Ghost Phone transition was surprisingly smooth once I’d done that groundwork. I mapped every app I was using to an alternative beforehand. I set up Signal instead of iMessage, PaxMail instead of Apple Mail, LibreOffice instead of MS Office and found the replacements were genuinely solid. Nothing I actually needed was missing. Any specific questions I had (and some were technical) Mark37 was great at helping me figure it out.
I kept the MacBook, but I installed Fedora on it rather than replacing the hardware, and performance actually improved. The Linux app ecosystem is more capable than most people realize, and the ones that aren’t available natively run well through Flatpak or the browser. Would have been a lot easier to just get a Ghost Laptop though 🙂
The parallel running period was really important for me. I kept both systems active for several weeks to use the old iPhone and Ghost Phone side by side, macOS still accessible in a partition. That overlap caught things I would have lost: a 2FA app tied only to the old device, contacts that hadn’t fully migrated, an old Apple ID recovery email that needed updating before I closed the account. The transition period is where mistakes happen if you rush it. It’s also where your confidence grows that you’re actually taking control of your digital life.
The discomfort of decoupling fades. What replaces it is something I didn’t anticipate: a kind of clarity that starts with your phone and doesn’t stop there. I made better decisions about my finances, reclaimed hours I was wasting, and stopped outsourcing my judgment to algorithms designed to exploit it. You don’t realize how much Big Tech is shaping your thinking until you step outside it. Shame it took 30 years.
My Testimony
by Victoria
As a former Apple user for many years, I found myself entangled in the invisible workings of the iOS ecosystem and completely without power or control of my devices and data.
I found myself in a seemingly cyclical battle to defend my private data… I would intentionally switch off iCloud only to have it automatically turned back on again during updates without my consent. Apps wouldn’t work without updating the operating system, so opting out of software updates always came to an end. When I would follow up the update to turn iCloud off again, if I missed a toggle, files would be removed from my device and stored solely in iCloud. Photos taken on an Apple device are in a format not recognized outside of the Apple ecosystem and photo and music source files are hidden and difficult to find.
While later learning that data collection was a key to the building of an all-encompassing control grid, I also learned that alternatives existed. Being averse to spending a lot of time with figuring out technology, I needed a plug-and-play device.
My first privacy device, which I am still using, was a Ghost Phone. The price was reasonable and apps were curated, loaded and ready to go.
The key to bringing a new phone online is getting phone, messaging, and email running. I stuck with my existing provider – Verizon. Not ideal, but easier to not change too many factors at once. For email, however, loading google mail on this clean new phone was not an option, so prior to getting my Ghost Phone, I set up a new email service so it could be connected as soon as the phone arrived.
With these key items working, I felt free to explore other functions over time. There was immediate relief that I could add and remove apps and find things easily. The daily frustration of feeling trapped and manipulated by my iPhone was gone.
Learning the new GrapheneOS interface took a little attention, but the settings and operation were intuitive, so that was just a matter of getting familiar. From my experience, it was a little challenging syncing across devices as it is a manual process since data and apps are not automatically rounded up (collected) as they had been in Apple. Another area that has taken some adjustment is mapping apps. Magic Earth is the one I currently use and I really like the interface. It doesn’t seem to have as large of a database of business names as the tracking map apps, so it is helpful when setting out somewhere to have specific addresses on hand.
The upsides of the transition to a Ghost Phone are felt daily! With a single swipe, I can turn off location services, microphone and camera access, and wifi. I breathe a sigh of relief every day that I can use the phone with confidence it is not tracking and targeting me. It is so simple to be able to add and remove any application at will – no warnings that other functions will stop working or moreover that I am not allowed to remove something. There are two main app libraries – one with standard apps (Aurora) and the other with open source apps (F-Droid). There are open source apps for all the standard functions. For example, AntennaPod is my favorite podcast app out there.
Overall, I have come to use less apps. Wanting to keep the phone clean and feel confidence in it, my default response to apps is ‘no thanks’. They really have to earn a place on the phone.
And as a backup, any apps or functions needed can typically be accessed via the web browser. When I do decide to load a standard app from the Aurora store, most load and can be used with no sign-ins. When sign-ins are needed, it is immediately clear which apps are tracking and collecting data.
Instead of arbitrarily installing apps, I make an intentional decision by asking myself: “What am I willing to give for the ‘convenience’ of this app?” Sharing my data is not a price I am willing to pay, therefore I am deliberate about making the choice to find alternative ways to operate or I will choose to give some things up.
Using privacy-oriented devices feels to me like a ‘canary in a coal mine’. They reveal where things are tightening and where I need to adjust and be vigilant.
Beyond the Ghost Phone, I have also now added a Linux-based Ghost Laptop. The computer itself has been a breeze. The main challenge with Linux is related to being a former Macbook user. As such, hardware devices such as a scanner and label maker haven’t worked with Linux since they were designed specifically for MacOS. My workaround for the time being is to clean off the Mac, keep it offline, and keep it connected to those two hardware devices so I can still use them.
My Ghost Laptop connected easily to my Brother multi-function printer.
While the quality of MARK37’s devices matter to me, what means the most is their investigation into the ownership and funding of apps they load and recommend. It is wonderful starting off with a device on which everything has been curated based on long-term integrity. By far, the best part of using a Ghost phone (and Ghost Laptop) is the peace of mind both in current use of it and knowing that by taking this step I am more fit to take other privacy steps as needed.
Using an iPhone or Google phone is unthinkable to me anymore!