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
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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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As others have mentioned, this is a matter of threat model. To be realistic, a sufficiently determined government will always be able to access your communications, but companies like Facebook and Google can only access them if you give it to them willingly. On the other hand, if other people you communicate with do this by themselves, then you’ve gone through all that effort for nothing. It’s also worth pointing out that it cannot be proven that a regular phone does not have corporate spyware installed, so this may be another way your information could leak to companies.
That said, it is pretty insulting that tech companies have decided that they’re simply entitled to everyone’s private communication data. That for me is probably the biggest motivator in trying to avoid their services as much as possible.
If you use encrypted messages and both people using the messages have a phone with disk encryption then there is literally no way for a government to gain access to your messages. That is assuming the government isn’t going to torture you.