[LineageOS Questions & Answers] jlshwa9001:
Real State of the art Privacy using Lineage OS. De-Googling and MicroG. Achieving True stealth on the Internet.

For 11 years now i have been learning about privacy. Privacy on devices, private networks, private Internet Connections and Secure and Private Digital footprints on the Web.

Every generation of Lineage OS that has come out I have tried to improve my privacy every time i reinstall the OS on my phone.

This time is did something different. I had discovered the amazing abilities of using shell on my phone in combination with root access on the phone over ADB and monitoring network activity with netstat on the phone and a Pihole on my home network.

Now if you are serious about privacy by now you would have realized that the entire mobile phone network is not private. connecting to the mobile phone network allows the mobile phone company you use to find your location and identify you while your device is connected to the towers. that means the government can watch you and know your real time location, just like if you were under house arrest and had to wear one of those GPS tracking anklets. Yes i am being serious they are collecting data on everyone and tracking us all like animals in real time. Have you seen the Snowden Movie? now lets just be clear here and say that most of us in the privacy field have nothing to hide, people in the privacy field just believe that their systems should be zero access. what that means is that when you use a system only you have access to that data. and in addition they believe that you should be anonymous when using the Web as much as is possible and this includes not being tracked in real time. Now it goes without saying that the only way to be verify-ably secure and private is to use open-source code that can be verified for security and privacy by the user. and if you are the user and owner of a device you should have root access to that device because you are the owner of that device.

Now when you apply all this logic and rules, the only way to have a secure phone is to basically turn it into an IPod Touch like device, or in other words only use it over WiFi.

This is what i have started doing now. I keep the phone in flight mode, with WiFi enabled and only use the mobile network when absolutely necessary or in emergencies. some ultra secure people will take this a step further and use a portable 4g mobile wifi hotspot in combination with their phone. This is because the phones modem has the ability to upload a rootkit onto your devices storage in the case of nation state actors.

Once i started using the phone in this manner i also decided to see what network connections were coming from the handset in WiFi mode by using netstat on the phone and investigating DNS queries from the phone that were going through my pihole.

I discovered two areas of issue:

204 requests from the phone to googles servers to check for internet connectivity, which i solved using the post HERE:

GUIDE: How to avoid the Captive Portal Checkin to Google

Dear XDA community, this my first own thread and guide so please be forbear with me:) And i hope i choose the right section:) As the topic in the thread says it handles about the Captive Portal Checkin done by Android. So first some general...

xdaforums.com

and even though i had disabled WiFi Calling there were requests coming from the phone to register my phones SIM and IMEI with my mobile providers servers over WiFi for WiFi calling. this apparently cannot be disabled in settings. I Assume this has been done so the handset can always make emergency calls.

Both of these things were bypassing the root access firewall i had on the phone (AFWall+) and any VPN implemented. so both these things were compromising the handsets privacy by potentially reveling the phones owner and phones IP address and online status.

Now i must admit that although I am a software engineer, i have little experience modifying phone operating systems so after looking for a solution on the XDA Forums i consulted ChatGPT 4o.

Chat GPT suggested the following to disable IMS on Lineage OS for MicroG 21.0:

modify the /system/build.prop file to include the following lines:

# start added to disable IMS services

persist.dbg.volte_avail_ovr=0

persist.dbg.vt_avail_ovr=0

persist.dbg.wfc_avail_ovr=0

persist.radio.volte_enabled=0

persist.radio.vt_enabled=0

persist.radio.wfc_enabled=0

# end added to disable IMS services

It took me a while to actually implement this, it turned out that i had to put the phone in Lineage OS Recovery, enable ADB and mount the system partition and then remount /system as RW. then make the changes to build.prop and ensure the build.prop file had chmod 600 applied.

Unfortunately this didn't work and almost bricked my phone. the phone would not complete boot. MISSION FAILED.

Which brings us to this point here. I need help to prevent the phone from making requests to *.pub.3gppnetwork.org. in my case it is trying to access the mobile networks WiFi calling over WiFI.

What we want to do is disable these requests over WiFi. when the phone is connected to the mobile network this is not a problem though as you are already registered anyway direct to the mobile phone towers. however over WiFi we should be completely private and anonymous.

Can anybody help advance this work?