Affiliate Disclosure

Some links on DGdroid are affiliate links. If you click one and buy something, we may earn a commission. The price you pay is exactly the same.

As an Amazon Associate, DGdroid earns from qualifying purchases. We may also participate in other affiliate programs for phones, accessories and privacy services.

Three commitments:

1. Recommendations come first. We link to what we’d buy ourselves. If a product is bad, no commission makes it good.
2. Affiliate links are marked. Buttons and links that earn us a commission are labeled as affiliate links.
3. No pay-to-play. Nobody can buy a positive review or a spot in a buying guide.

Questions? See the about page or send us a note through the contact form.

How affiliate links work

When you click a “Buy on Amazon” button on this site, the link takes you to Amazon with our Associates tag, dgdroid-20, added to the address. If you then buy something, Amazon pays us a small percentage of the sale. The rate is set by Amazon for each product category, and you never pay more because you came from us.

Amazon’s reports show us which products were ordered through our links. They don’t tell us who you are, and we have no way to connect a purchase to a visit on this site. This site sets no cookies of its own. Once you’re on Amazon, Amazon’s own privacy policy and cookies apply, just as they would if you had gone there directly.

Which programs we use

Today, the only affiliate program on this site is Amazon Associates (US), with the tag dgdroid-20.

Many of the phones we recommend aren’t sold on Amazon. Links to makers’ own shops, such as Nitrokey, Above Phone, Murena, SHIFT, Jolla, Volla, Purism and Pine64, are plain links that earn us nothing. If we join another program in the future, we will name it on this page.

How we choose what to recommend

Our picks start from privacy and practicality, not from commission rates. Each phone is judged on which private operating systems it can run, how long it will get updates, how hard the install is, and what still works afterward. The scores come from the method described on our phone and OS scoring page, and the device support behind them comes from each OS project’s official support list.

Several things on this site follow from that rule:

• Some of our favorite phones, like the Jolla C2 and Librem 5, link only to the maker’s shop, so we earn nothing on them.
• We tell you when a phone can’t be degoogled, even if it’s a popular one, and offer a plan to cut tracking on it instead.
• The checker, the directory, the guides and the weekly email work the same whether or not you ever buy anything. The weekly email contains no Amazon affiliate links at all.

How affiliate links are labeled

Product buttons that earn a commission say where they lead, for example “Buy on Amazon”, and the site footer carries our Amazon Associates statement on every page. In the page code, every affiliate link is marked with rel=“sponsored”, the label search engines use for paid links.

What we don’t do

• We don’t accept payment in exchange for coverage, reviews or a better score.
• We don’t run ad networks or embed ad or affiliate scripts, pixels or widgets on our pages.
• We don’t let any brand review our verdicts before they’re published.

Common questions

Why do some buttons go to Amazon and others to a maker’s shop? We link to Amazon when a product is reliably sold there in the US, and to the maker when that’s the only real place to buy it. Prices change often, so compare before you buy.

Does it matter which country I’m in? Our Amazon links go to Amazon.com in the US. If you shop on another Amazon store, search for the product there; we don’t earn anything from other Amazon stores.

If you’d rather not use an affiliate link, that’s fine. Search for the product on the seller’s site directly. Our device lookup tool and plain-language how-to library stay free either way.