Spoofing IMEI isn’t helping if OP pays for the service with bank account / credit card, or walks in a store to pay but with face exposed, or turns on the cell-hotspot device on at home (because they’ll be able to associate the SIM/Service-Plan with your address via cellular triangulation, and thus your identity)

By hiding the IMEI, the provider won’t be able to associate the device with me when I use it solely on public Wi-Fi such as in a café

I think you’re a little confused. Connecting to Public Wifi (or any wifi), will not reveal IMEI, it does reveal your Wifi MAC Address, and if you have Bluetooth on, it will reveal your Bluetooth MAC Address, but will not reveal your IMEI (unless you have malware on your phone).

In modern smartphones, including iOS, Android, and especially GrapheneOS, Wifi MAC addresses are spoofed by default, generating a random MAC address for each Wifi network. You can even go to Developer settings of Android to enable randomization for each different session of the same wifi network (or you can “forget” the network and reconnect and, from my testing, it would immediately change the MAC address for that network).

Although, if you have iOS or Google’s Android, you can’t be sure if the companies themselves are tracking you, but but a privacy Android ROM (like GrapheneOS) with Wifi MAC randomization enabled should be very safe.

Keep Airplane mode on so it stops connecting to cell towers.

Though I’m still curious about:

May I also ask how much information is carried to the second device by using hotspot? By this I meant the phone with IMEI will be able to know my device name, but what else? Will the phone with IMEI also be able to know the device model?

Your device name and Wifi MAC address is revealed, so change the default “Google Pixel” to something else to hide the fact that it’s a Google Pixel. But, some wifi access points can detect your device model anyways. My Xfinity gateway will show my Phone’s name and what model of phone I have. So I’ll just assume that: Device Name, Device Model, and MAC (which is randomized) is known. Shouldn’t be that much of a privacy risk unless Google Pixels aren’t popular in your area. If there are a lot of Google Pixels around, they can’t prove it was your Google Pixel.

Is it a good enough solution for IMEI tracking to use an alternative device to provide a hotspot connection?

What?

So you wanna use another phone as a hotspot and connect your GrapheneOS Phone to it?

I mean, what exactly do you mean by “IMEI Tracking”? Location?

Well they won’t know the location of your GrapheneOS Phone, but they’ll still know the location of your alternate phone. Not sure what you’re trying to achieve here.

There are still countries even worse than the US.

And I think you’re underestimating the strength of an immigrant’s will to take risks to attempt to find a better life. Immigrants have suffered far worse throught US History.

I mean, just take a look at Wong Kim Ark. Dude didn’t just give up and leave, he stood his ground and fought though it, even though he had no idea if the US would even consider his case seriously.

And many people already have relatives in the US. So these are the risks they are willing to take to reunite. Unlike many westerners, who just completely give up on the slightest obstacles.

(Although I do think the much better option now is the EU, if they don’t have any relatives in the US already.)

Kernel-Level AntiCheat has joined the chat

I wonder how times have changed. I know someone who immigrated to the US around 2010s, they had no social media, most of their country didn’t really have internet yet. They were let in just fine and have since became a US citizen.

So is 2010s have no expectation of having social media, but now its an expectation?

deleted by creator

Make a fake one that posts like… idk post random tech stuff that you could be reasonably interested in. Make nothing critical of authority. As a decoy profile.

Then you can rant about big brother on an anonymous Lemmy Account over TOR.

I don’t think that matters.

It doesn’t matter if you are trying to overthrow, say a US Adversary like Russia or China, its still counts. I guess the logic is: If you are willing to use violence in [Insert Country Here], how do we know you wont try it here?

A lot of the initial supporters of a revolution/coup gets purged so they don’t become a threat to the new authority themselves. Like hitler and the S.A. for example.

MAGAt supporters are just useful idiots, if they successfully fully take over, those same supporters now become the new threat that needs to be purged.

“Have you ever attempted to overthrow a government by force or violence?”

Non-Citizen MAGAt: sweats profusely