Samsung Galaxy A17 5G (2025)

Thanks to Australia’s “thoughtful” government regulators, I’ve been forced into this Galaxy A17; a device I never wanted and wouldn’t have chosen in a million years. While they happily killed off 3G and blocked proper overseas handsets like mine, the only affordable option left for me was this slow, buggy, privacy-hostile brick from Samsung, pushed through Vodafone.

This isn’t just another mediocre mid-ranger. It’s a spyware device wearing a phone-shaped disguise.

I went from owning a **FairPhone 5**; a genuinely user-owned device I could repair anywhere in Australia, with proper modularity and zero corporate surveillance baked in; to this locked-down Samsung surveillance node. The FairPhone felt like it could last a decade or more. This thing feels ready for landfill in 2–3 years, maximum.

From the very first boot, the Galaxy A17 aggressively funnels you into the Samsung/Google/carrier panopticon. You can’t even use the d#mn thing properly without agreeing to their ecosystem first. Here’s what you’re actually signing up for:

- **Broad device and usage tracking** across Samsung services, including location data, usage patterns, and account details. - **Customisation Service**; Samsung’s own admission of a profiling engine that actively collects, combines, and analyses your data for “personalised” content. They even confirm that turning it off stops the harvesting, which tells you exactly how invasive it is when enabled. - **Samsung Ads** that use advertising IDs to serve personalised ads across their devices and platforms. - **Samsung Account** that quietly expands the data dragnet unless you hunt down and disable every toggle for personalised ads, special offers, location, and “Customisation Service.” - Third-party partners baked in, with Samsung washing its hands of responsibility for whatever those partners do with your data.

You can spend an hour turning off tracking, diagnostics, ads, voice assistants, cloud sync, and location; but the phone is still *built* for surveillance. It’s not privacy-respecting by default; it’s privacy-hostile by design. Samsung doesn’t want owners. They want users locked into their ecosystem, generating data and dependency.

This is the same greedy playbook we’ve seen before: planned obsolescence, repair hostility, and mass surveillance dressed up as “features.” All while our own government clears the field for them by killing competition and older networks.

Bottom line: This phone “works” as a bare-minimum compliant emergency device once you’ve neutered half its functionality. But it is a massive downgrade in ownership, repairability, longevity, and privacy.

Samsung, you didn’t win me as a customer. You got me as a hostage. And the product reflects exactly that.

Up yours to the power-drunk corporate greed junkies and the money motivated lobby corrupted regulators who made this my only realistic option.