Phones are no longer ours. A bit like bought ebooks, games, movies,and the like. we just payfor the right to use them. ok the phones we can keep, so we pay a lot for the hardware, but the OS: not. They like to advertise it as part of the phonev but it' not. The little surveillance machines.

If buying is not owning, pirating is not stealing.

Piracy isn’t merely a virtue, but a moral imperative, an obligation to uphold civic freedom.

It is immoral not to pirate. It is everyone’s duty to do their part in normalizing and encouraging piracy.

Pirate... what? A phone? Android? Banking apps?

The problem here isn't the money, it's the lack of privacy and control.

The best analog I can think of to piracy in this situation would be rooting the phone/installing GrapheneOS. And, yeah, that's definitely something people should do if they want that control, but I really hope people don't put it in the same category as piracy...

This may be a debatable definition, but I think of piracy somewhat as a broad term for anything that can be categorized as counter-anticircumvention.

See also this article from Cory Doctorow:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/

What makes a phone a viable consumer device is the baseband controller. The majority of that complexity lies in the software on the controller and not in the hardware the implements it.

How many companies even produce these controllers?

Pirating, I mean actual pirating, is absolutely stealing,

But that weak ass crime, that we like to call pirating in order to appear cool, No, that is not theft at all.