This is a follow-up to my earlier thread, “Can my PC protect an Android tablet?” I’ve split it off that thread because the information may be useful enough to warrant its own presence in the AW forum listings.
Regular readers of this forum will know of my great interest in avoiding/minimizing surveillance on the devices that I use. So when thinking about buying the Android tablet, I wondered if if might be possible to run it the same way I run all my Windows machines: with no account linking me to the OS’s powers-that-be.
From the way that others around the Internet write about their phones, for a long time I’d thought it was impossible to run an Android device without establishing a Google account. The train of thought runs along these lines: “Why do you have a problem using a Microsoft account? You already have a Google account on your phone!” The implied assumption is that a Google account is necessary to use an Android device. Well, as it turns out, it’s not—at least, not for a tablet that has no phone functionality.
As I was setting up the tablet, I reached a screen asking me to sign into or set up a Google account. Intriguingly, there was an option to Skip this step, so I selected it. After a description of all the cool things I’d be missing out on if I didn’t connect to a Google account, I went ahead and told it to proceed without said account.
Android veterans may consider this old-hat, but as a non-expert I was delighted to discover that at this point the tablet did not brick itself, collapse into a pile of dust, or otherwise refuse to continue working. It simply proceeded to work.
The main drawback I can see from avoiding signing into a Google account (or setting up an account with the manufacturer, Samsung) is that I can’t install apps from the Google Play store (or from the Samsung store). So downloading a browser other than the ones the device came with (Google Chrome and Samsung Internet) involved going to the app developer’s site to download their APK (Android Package Kit) for the app. And in order to install the APK, I had to go into Settings –> Security and privacy –> More security settings –> Install unknown apps, and then allow the installation of apps obtained via Samsung Internet. In the same Security and privacy menu, I also made sure that Auto Blocker was set to Off.
After installing the desired apps, I enabled Auto Blocker and disabled SI from installing apps so that no further, unwanted apps could be installed later without my participation.
By this method, I’ve installed my newspaper’s app and the DuckDuckGo browser. To install these I had to go into the Android app repository apkmirror.com. (Before going in there, I used a PC to check the safety of the site in VirusTotal, which gave the site a perfect threat score of 0 from 96 different malware scanners.)
I should add that traditional anti-virus software doesn’t seem to be necessary here. Now, I only have experience with Samsung devices—other brands may have protections that are comparable, or not—but this one comes with Knox Security which appears to have most of the cybersecurity bases covered.
In addition, the DDG browser for Android has a neat feature, App Tracking Protection, which scans all the apps on the tablet for third-party trackers and then blocks them. In the few days I’ve had the tablet, it’s already blocked nearly two thousand tracking attempts from my newspaper’s app. I can also pick and choose the apps to be scanned by DDG’s tracking protection.
If I ever decide to take the tablet away with me, though (say, on vacation), I may face a choice whether to create a Google or Samsung account in order to run a VPN for even more protection.
