DeGoogle Yourself

I was just wondering earlier today if Google kept the bootloader open to allow custom OS installation only because they had other hardware on the phone that would send them their information anyways, possibly through covert side channels.

Like they could add listeners for cell signals that pick up data encoded in the lower bits of timestamps attached to packets, which would be very difficult to detect (like I'm having trouble thinking of a way to determine if that's happening even if you knew to look for it).

Or maybe there's a sleeper code that can be sent to "wake up" the phone's secret circuitry and send bulk data when Google decides they want something specific (since encoding in timestamps would be pretty low bandwidth), which would make detection by traffic analysis more difficult, since most of the time it isn't sending anything at all.

This is just speculation, but I've picked up on a pattern of speculating that something is technically possible, assuming there's no way they'd actually be doing that, and later finding out that it was actually underestimating what they were doing.

Do they have passkeys yet

Edit: passkeys support. Last year when I checked they didn't support pass keys yet.