Whenever people ask about ways to make their smartphones more private or which is the most privacy-respecting phone to get, there’s always a few people confidently asserting “all smartphones are spy tools, get a dumbphone with no apps if you want to be private”. Which is ridiculous advice for a few reasons
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Dumbphones usually run either proprietary operating systems or outdated forks of Android. They’re almost never encrypted. They rarely get security updates. They’re a lot more vulnerable than even a regular Android phone
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With dumbphones, you’re usually limited to regular phone calls or SMS/MMS messaging. These are ancient communication standards with zero built-in privacy. Your ISP can read any text message you send and view metadata logs of any phone calls you make. In lots of places (like Australia where I live) ISPs are actually required to keep logs of your messages and phone calls
With even a regular Android phone you at least have access to encrypted messaging apps like Signal or Session so your conversations aren’t fair game for anyone who wants to read them. Of course there are better options. iOS (not perfect but better than most bloatware-filled Android devices) and a pixel with GrapheneOS (probably the best imo) are much better options; but virtually anything out there is going to be better for privacy than a dumbphone
Edit: Thanks everyone for giving your thoughts. Some really good points I hadn’t thought much about
It’s not about having a device that’s secure, it’s about having a device that you use less, to the point that it’s not much of an attack surface for surveillance capitalism or (possibly) hostile governments.
It’s much harder to profile someone if they aren’t fed a steady stream of what you say and what you click upon.
I would argue that phone that a phone that runs Android is not a dumb phone. Not having a Google account logged into your phone is a huge step towards privacy.
See:
- Mudita Kompakt
- Punkt MP02
- etc.
Also don’t fall into the trap that privacy is a binary issue. There’s a massive spectrum.
You can make a smartphone (more) private, but out of the box and loaded with standard apps (eg Google), its a privacy nightmare. So I get where they are coming from. Sure using SMS isn’t private, but dropping all that app addiction is.
GrapheneOS or nothing. We have to support them whenever we can more than ever. The battle against mass surveillance will become increasingly difficult. Many countries are heading towards neo-fascism and will use all state power to end privacy at all costs
Yes but you also have to get your phone from a hardware manufacturer who you trust, so not google or Samsung or huawei or… etc.
Fair phone maybe?
I can’t speak for everyone, but if I’m using a dumb phone, I’m not going to be doing any of the things that I’m worried about them hearing.
If ICE grabs my phone right now and beats me until I lock it. They’re going to be looking through my lemmy history.
I’m not going to hold a long political dissertation over SMS or during a phone call.
What I really want to at this point is a pager, a cellular Wi-Fi access point, and an 8" tablet that can run Linux and sip power so I can just pretend I don’t have a device.
What I really want to at this point is a pager, a cellular Wi-Fi access point, and an 8" tablet that can run Linux and sip power so I can just pretend I don’t have a device.
This is basically what I was thinking. Where can I find a fully functioning 8" Linux Tablet? I feel like the rest of it is easy peasy.
Edit: In my head, I am imagining a steam deck but with the side controller bits snapped off. Someone pls make this. lol
I keep hoping the Halium project will pick up support for some small tablet, but those are almost all bootloader-locked. I don’t love Halium, but anything is better than what we have, I could deal with some UBPorts.
I even looked at DIY. There’s no lack of 7" touchscreens, but Pi’s are apparently bad on power. There are a couple of mini clone boards that might work, but they all have tradeoffs and red flags.
I feel like every time Halium comes up it comes with qualifying statements (like “I don’t love Halium”). I don’t really know enough about it to know why that is. What are the problems with Halium that people don’t like? Is it what it does (or how it does it) that is the problem, or something else about the project?
The primary problem we have with putting Linux on phones is a lack of drivers. Hallium is basically fishing bits and pieces out of AOSP, then feeding that data into the Linux install. The upside is that we get pretty good power management and we get working cameras and working radios and all those creature comforts you really expect a phone to have.
The downside is that Google (and nearly every hardware manufacturer) is rather aggressively heading towards locking third parties and out of things. It’s not hard to envision a world where a couple of back room deals are made and some firmware updates happen. And all of a sudden, hardware that is at any updates is not capable of running Halium.
Halium’s core system partition is also read-only, so there’s some lack of hacking ability there that we’d really like to see. You have to put the custom stuff you want into a separate container. Not impassable, though.
Halium is at the very least private and works fine right now. Will it continue to work? Once the eye of Sauron hits it, will it survive? Will it be sued into submission? Will it be sabotaged by Google or the hardware manufacturers?
It might very well be the crutch we need for now. But it also makes sense to get the hell off of it as soon as we can.
Gotcha, that makes sense. Thank you for explaining it!
And your keystrokes are logged on phones where you use Signal…
Dumbphones are more private. Privacy is on a scale, and you have less apps and systems that track you and profile you on a dumbphone.
Do you want true privacy? Don’t use a phone…
