If You Don’t Want Your Data Sold, Fairphone 6 Should Be Your Next Phone

The GrapheneOS team has published a response to this article, and /e/OS has responded in their own blog post. See the editorial note at the end of this article for a fuller discussion.

Do you ever wish that your smartphone was a little more like our cell phones of old? Phones where you could quickly swap in a new battery, or forget about charging it for a few days, or use it without worrying what personal data Apple or Google was collecting about you? My old Nokia never showed me an ad for the new F1 movie in my wallet app, for example.

If you want a modern smartphone that does all that, the Fairphone 6 is the phone for you. It’s repairable and comes with a 5-year warranty and at least 8 years of security updates. But for anyone concerned about privacy, the more important selling point may be that it runs a de-Googled operating system (by default in the US version and as an option in the EU) that gives all of the benefits of Android, without its significant privacy problems.

Fair Enough

Last week, we tore down the Fairphone 6 and gave it a 10 out of 10 repairability score, the same top marks as the previous model.

Physically, the Fairphone 6 is a little smaller than the 5, and has a slightly bigger battery, which Dutch maker Fairphone says will last for more than two days on a charge. The back plate and battery are both secured with screws, which makes battery replacement a slightly slower process than in the Fairphone 5. But it’s still pretty easy, less than a two-minute procedure. The back plate’s screw holes can also be used to attach various accessories, from shoulder straps to hand strap, with presumably more third-party options to come in future. 

Fairphone continues to produce top-of-class devices, repairability-wise. But for once, we’re not focusing on repairability here.

Today, we’re talking about privacy, and how the Fairphone might be the best phone for folks who care about the amount of data Google, Apple, and Samsung might collect and use. [Editorial note: As the GrapheneOS response to this article points out, there are indeed other phones that come with de-Googled operating systems pre-installed.]

There’s a Massive Market for Your Personal Data

Google and Apple, as the providers of the two dominant smartphone operating systems in Western markets, manage and monetize user data in ways that reflect their differing business models. Google collects broad datasets, including location history, browser activity, app usage, even after users disable ad personalization. Many privacy-conscious users find that some level of tracking persists despite deliberate efforts to limit it.

Apple, by contrast, limits third‑party access to sensitive data such as photos and browsing behavior, though it has faced scrutiny over internal practices. For instance, Apple acknowledged that Siri voice recordings were sent to contract workers for review. These recordings allegedly included conversations between doctors and patients, sex, and drug deals, prompting concerns about the scale and transparency of such reviews.

Meanwhile, the broader data‑brokering ecosystem operates on a massive commercial scale. The global data broker market is valued around $433 billion this year. Brokers collect information from public records, apps, IoT devices, and social media, aggregating profiles of even billions of people, often including sensitive attributes like financial or demographic details.

Advertisers and agencies use it to deliver personalized ads, sometimes predicting consumer behavior before purchase. Hedge funds and market analysts spend millions per year on alternative data, ranging from satellite feeds to credit card logs, to inform trading decisions. Government and law enforcement agencies have been documented buying location and behavior data without legal oversight, raising civil liberties concerns.

That’s where de-Googled Android comes in. Android started out as an open-source project based on Linux, and as such, anyone can take Android and build upon it. 

In the EU, you can buy the Fairphone with either regular Android 15, or you can opt for the de-Googled /e/OS, an Android-based operating system from European company Murena. Murena is also the distribution partner for the US version of the Fairphone 6, which is only available with /e/OS. With /e/OS, you still get to use most Android apps, but without having to worry about your phone sending your location or other data off to Google every few minutes. [Editorial note: /e/OS includes the Murena voice-to-text service, which transmits data to OpenAI without an opt-out option, a practice that has received some criticism in the privacy community.]

Fairphone also formally supports unlocking your bootloader, offering official documentation for running alternative operating systems. They “embrace” open source, though they’re not fully open, saying they share “as much source code as we legally can.”

There are lots of options for running de-Googled Android. CalyxOS for example, is a privacy-focused OS that runs on the Fairphones 4 and 5, and will almost certainly support the Fairphone 6. Another is GrapheneOS, which we will see again in a moment. But the point of the Murena-flavored Fairphone is that you don’t have to worry about installing anything. You just buy the /e/OS version of the Fairphone and switch it on. You can create a Murena user ID, which is Murena’s baked-in equivalent of Google’s G-Suite, but it’s completely optional. If you prefer you can even self-host the cloud part of the setup, for ultimate zero-trust privacy. Or total-trust privacy, I guess, depending on how you look at it.

This means that you don’t need to be a nerd or techie to stop Big Tech snooping on you. You can safely recommend this to your family and friends and not have to worry about having to drive across the city to reinstall a kernel or whatever. Along with its repairability, this makes the Fairphone a great choice for users concerned about their phones sending data to Google.

Downsides

It’s not all perfect. There are some things you can’t do with a Google-free phone. Some banking apps will refuse to run on a phone that isn’t running stock Android, for example. This is why /e/OS uses something called MicroG, which is kind of like adding Google Play Services to your phone as a regular user rather than an admin. This lets you install many Play Store apps. Adding Contactless payments is also a problem. The default place to store and use your credit cards on an Android phone is in Google Wallet, which you don’t have on a de-Googled phone (although it’s worth noting that you can still install some Google apps on an /e/OS Fairphone).

There are workarounds. Nerd and tinkerer Terence Eden found that he could make contactless payments on his phone running another de-Googled Android OS, GrapheneOS by using virtual credit card app Curve. The actual payments are made via one of your Curve cards, but are billed to your regular credit card. 

It’s a hassle for sure, especially if you are all-in on using your phone for payments. But we’re getting there, and perhaps by the time your current phone finally breaks, or—more likely—its OS can no longer be updated, then all of these little wrinkles will have been ironed out. My old iPhone still has several years left in it, but my next phone will be a Fairphone. Heck, the Fairphone 6 looks so sleek that I’m tempted to sell my iPhone and move over now. 

Editorial Note: In the GrapheneOS and /e/OS teams’ public discussion of this post, there is an intense and nuanced debate about the relative merits of both privacy and security, which are two different topics. The GrapheneOS team has created an architecture focused on security, while /e/OS’s objective is to create an alternative ecosystem and minimize data transmission to Google to improve privacy. Its creator Gaël Duval readily admits that /e/OS is not a hardened operating system, although they hope to improve in the future.

OS/application security and data privacy are deeply intertwined. But they are not synonymous. iFixit stands by the claims made in the above blog post about the advantages of /e/OS when it comes to protecting user data and keeping it from being passed on to Google or other vendors without the Fairphone owner’s knowledge or consent. However, we also recognize the potential for insecure or vulnerable mobile or embedded operating systems to facilitate device compromises that can, potentially, result in the leak or theft of user data. Yes, data theft and hacking are different problems than OS vendors overtly harvesting and monetizing user data as part of their business models. Still, for mobile device users concerned about controlling access to their data, theft vs. harvesting and monetization is a distinction without much difference.

The teams hard at work on both these distributions are contributing to making the world more open, free, private, and secure. That’s fantastic. We all benefit from the effort in this space.

Some of the original phrasing in our article was too hyperbolic and has been changed. Specifically, we changed the phrase “this makes the Fairphone probably the best phone for anyone who values their privacy even slightly” to “this makes the Fairphone a great choice for users concerned about their phones sending data to Google.”

We welcome the ongoing debate and thank both the /e/OS and GrapheneOS teams for their contributions to a freer technological future.