Hey there,
I am thinking about buying the Cat B40 feature phone.
My gut feeling tells me that since it does not run either iOS or Android, is a relatively small company in the data/tech sector, and generally it’s literally just a feature phone with barely any… well, features, let alone any that would make my data valuable, it should not be profitable for anyone to harvest any data or spy on me. But I realize that’s prejudice and I have nothing to back that gut feeling up, and hell, they could still track my location or whatever.
I can find no real information on which operating system runs on the thing, let alone what it can or cannot do software-wise. Does anyone have any information on that thing?
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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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Its a dumb phone, you insert a sim card and thats it. The telco will know where you are based on the sim connection to towers (as with any other phones) and all calls and texts are stored, but other than than you dont have to worry about anything else. I suppose you dont have to login to some account to make it work therefore even if it harvests any data, it does not know who it belongs to (no add ID) so not saleable. Its pretty easy, no real identity (through email, account, etc) attached to it = private.
Privacy-wise your calls and SMS can still be spied on, and you can still be tracked by GSM Triangulation since the phone is capable of 4G.
Also afaik it runs Mocor which is designed for dumb phones, and I’ve read somewhere that Mocor was an Android 4.4 fork or something like that, but APKs won’t start/run.
It’s running a proprietary OS, so it’s basically a black box in which you don’t know what’s happening.
In the user opinions and reviews section at gsmarena, someone said that the B35 uses Kai OS. So probably the same OS for the B40.
Should be more private than a iOS or Android phone just for the fact that’s a “dumb” phone. No wireless no GPS. Basically just phone calls and SMS. I don’t know if there’s anything more privacy friendly than that out there.
But it does have 4G and GPS and all.
gsmarena says that it doesn’t have GPS. The official site doesn’t mention it either.
The best part is “Operating system: Proprietary”. Strange that they don’t have a name for it…
Some say “OS: None” because it’s more like firmware at this point.
Anyway, the might have installed a backdoor but how would you know? Pretty unlikely though, I think.