I think one the biggest sells, especially for these custom rom's is privacy to be honest. I don't really trust Google or Apple with the data they probably collect. During COVID parents were being reported to law enforcement for CSAM when sending pictures of there kids medical issues to doctors(Archive Link).
One I guess could argue that sure shit happens when it comes to that scenario, but with the political climate in America combined with the fact that some of the largest tech companies seem to be kowtowing to whatever the current administration is doing, probably makes a lot of people rethink privacy and to find alternatives.
Back when I worked in web hosting I would occasionally get calls mostly from certain European countries and websites mainly doing online gambling which was illegal in those countries. They would always try and demand I hand over the owner of the website and to take it offline.
My response was always the same unless you have a court order from our government than fuck off.
The ones that did have court orders were always interesting cases though and the crazy ones were the ones with court not to take down the website but to plugin a device to monitor all the traffic and every year they would send a new order to let them monitor it for another year
Not sure if this is the exact one they mention, but they're called key emulators and can get quite expensive, this one is 23,000 https://unlockcarsgrabber.com/product/codegrabber-p31-keyless-go-nintendo-tetris-gameboy/
Paramilitary Leaks (Magnet): Over 200 gigabytes of chat logs and recordings from paramilitary groups and militias including American Patriots Three Percent (APIII) and the Oath Keepers, collected by wilderness survival guide John Williams.
Paramilitary Election Interference (Magnet): A curated selection of 202 GB of leaked chat logs and files from the Paramilitary Leaks focused on efforts by paramilitary and far-right groups to influence and interfere with elections, beginning with America's 2022 mid-term elections.
Magnet2 368.8 GB of additional material added 30 October 2024 updating records and chat logs to 25 October 2024. The new material appears as a second download, torrent, and magnet link, above.
APIII leaders target DDoSecrets (Magnet): Dozens of chat messages, photos and audio from inside the APIII State Leaders' private chat. The messages reveal that the militia leadership's interest in DDoSecrets lasted for at least a year, with the intent of identifying and locating its members.
Oath Keepers (Magnet): Approximately 5 gigabytes of emails, chat logs, members and donor lists and other files from the servers of the Oath Keepers.
Liberty Counsel (Torrent): Liberty Counsel helped overturn Roe v. Wade, and claim to have prayed with Supreme Court justices. This release also includes more than 100 internal databases from mostly Christian missionary groups that use the same software for customer relationship management (CRM), called WMTEK. WMTEK develops software exclusively for non-profits that are supposedly Christian.
Parler (Download): Over a million videos and a million images uploaded to Parler, including ones from the January 6 Washington D.C. coup attempt. “Everything we grabbed was publicly available on the web, we just made a permanent public snapshot of it,” one source told VICE.
Project Whispers (Download): Over 9,800,000 searchable messages from neo-Nazi, QAnon and other far right Discord servers.