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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Yes, sim calls and sms are not private, both on dumb and smart phones. They also connect to cell towers so your location might be found. Anyway, I think the hardware and software of a smartphone is more capable of surveillance you than a dumbphone. The only realistic way is to leave the phone home and keep a paper list of your contacts at you. And call them from a stranger if you need to. I did this and the biggest inconvenience is that I can’t take pictures or videos (I might buy a camera, I don’t know if they have location system incorporated).
I think you’re conflating security with privacy. Not that they are unrelated, but something can be e.g. unencrypted but lack telemetry.
Not that dumbphones are inherently private, but I don’t think they’re less private either. They’re just what you use if you have no need for all the smartphone functions.
Idk, being locked in to using only communication protocols that are known to be roughly wide open seems like kind of a privacy non-starter, right? Sort of fails the attempt before you even start, no?
Edit: a wiser person than me reads the rest of the thread before a comment like the above, but I’m not them sadly. (AKA, plenty of good points made by others)
I suppose that begs the question of whether or not privacy (as used by this community) inherently means private in the colloquial sense, like the way a diary is private. Because to me, a e.g. public static website with no kind of profiling of its users is privacy-respecting, but obviously not private in the colloquial sense—it’s a public resource.
I do use SMS sometimes and I use it strictly for things that I’m happy to be basically public. Same for using other protocols like unencrypted email.
A stock smartphone is also locked in to mandatory telemetry, like a stock dumbphone. The practical difference is that there’s a much smaller community for installing custom FOSS OSes onto dumbphones compared to smartphones.
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.
If you have to connect to an intermediary to make a call, you can be heard and traced. GPRS is only marginally better if you and the one you call are on the same uncommon frequency
I think the main advantage is that if a state actor wants to Pegasus you, they can always get into a normal iOS/Android device until the next reboot. It’s not feasible, even with the resources of the Israeli state that Pegasus can support ALL models of random dumbphone that has ever existed, so there is a fair chance that while the security may not be modern on an old Nokia, they would need to burn 1000 development hours to deploy bugging malware into it that already “just works” with iOS and Android.
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.
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
Pine64 has something I think. I don’t know if it’s any good though.
I’ve mostly just heard they are a little under-spec’d in general, so performance is not great.
Okay, it’s no steam deck, but the GPD-4 6xxx model looks like it supports Linux reasonably well.
https://gpdstore.net/blog/gpd-pocket-4-review/
https://github.com/aarron-lee/gpd-win-tricks?tab=readme-ov-file#disable-fp-sensor-6800u-untested-on-newer-win-4-models
It’s an 8.8 inch 180 degree touchscreen and it has a keyboard built in.
It’s a pricey sausage, but not more expensive than my flagship phone.
That is very interesting indeed, thank you for bringing it up!
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!
I think the main problem is, that it solves a problem, that shouldn’t exist in the first place. If OEMs would build (and ideally also upstream) proper drivers, then we wouldn’t need a translation layer
GrapheneOs Duress Pin is what you are looking for in your described scenario i think
That’s a good way to get locked up for 6 months while they ‘investigate’ you
What are you trying to hide RUMBA??? Ihre Papiere bitte
there are cases out there of people being detained for years for not providing the unlock pin/passwords to encrypted data.
yup, I want no parts of that.
Here’s my license, here’s my phone. here’s my travel laptop.
I just stopped traveling altogether
I figured that the point of using a dumb phone would be that there hopefully wouldn’t be meaningful accounts, information, and communication to really get at. Regular calls and SMS were already fair game, and there is basically nothing else on there. Nothing for evil megacorps to siphon up, no social media, not much of anything.
Exactly, taking away tools which enable you to enhance your digital privacy, or the ability to use such tools, is fundamentally a flawed way to enhance your privacy in the long term.
Same for security with rooting, and it’s the same reason why the argument that “rooting makes your phone less secure” is a fundamentally flawed argument.
Yes! I hate that companies are trying to make people think thar rooting=unsafe. Then make it work safely. Root user is safe on Linux, then why it isn’t on phone?
That’s just boils down to user not giving root access to every app.
Because they don’t know what could potentially be running with root access and they’d rather block everything they don’t know.
Earlier this year my accountant asked me to install an app on my phone to give them access to some banking details and that app would not open the login screen without the gboard keyboard enabled, because they considered custom keyboard apps = bad. It also would not let me use password managers, so I was forced to put my banking details beyond a weaker password than any of my online accounts for random sites.
Exactly!
Ultimately rooting empowers users with control, and many company profit from users not having control, like Netflix, like Google with their ads, etc., so they love to make people think rooting is somehow unsafe lol
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:
Also don’t fall into the trap that privacy is a binary issue. There’s a massive spectrum.
Yes, I’ve only ever seen the term dumbphone used to mean a phone that’s just a phone, not a computer. No OS, software, internet, etc.
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.
Nice thing is, usually the dumb phones have removable batteries. So just remove the battery when you’re not using it. Problem solved.
Why would my Internet Service Provider have anything whatsoever to do with my dumb phone?
Yes, texts and calls aren’t hidden from your mobile phone provider, they never were. I agree it’s not great, and the government is likely spying on you as they have been for decades.
But alas, I don’t see a solution without using a non dumb phone and encrypted apps, which will require the internet and at that point you’ve not got a dumb phone any more.
My Nokia 3310 still works great. Sure, the government could spy on me, but I don’t discuss anything sensitive over the phone (traditionally one doesn’t, for this very reason, wiretaps and the like). It’s a tool for casually staying in touch and arranging to meet up _
Your cellular provider is an ISP.
No not necessarily. And people don’t call there mobile provider their ISP
They provide internet to your device, which makes them an internet service provider. And if nothing else, they also offer fixed wireless, which makes them an internet service provider.
Sure, Comcast can’t log your phone calls because they are a cable or fiber provider, but T-Mobile can absolutely log your calls, and they are still an ISP.
You are conflating privacy and security. They’re not unrelated, but generally speaking while a dumphone may be less secure than a smartphone, it’s also certainly more private.
How can you have a private phone with less security?
Edit: Certainly without security you cannot have true privacy
It is simple.
It produces significantly less data. It doesn’t have all the apps you are being tracked by reporting on your every move.
It doesn’t have faceid, and probably has a lot of exploits (less security), but the data it holds isn’t worth securing and it doesn’t provide a non-stop datamine (more privacy).
Basically, instead of having a large safe filled with gold, you have a duffel-bag with your old gym clothes. You don’t need security for old gym clothes.
Someone once broke into my sister’s car and stole her bag of gym clothes but I get what you’re saying.
Personally I would love a dumbphone but I find a smartphone too useful (specifically map and transit apps). I wish I could have the same number for one of each and only bring the smartphone when necessary.
And what is less private about face ID or fingerprints. You di now how those work? But from your comment I’m guessing you have no idea.
You’re just continuing the conflation by speaking about security functionality in terms of privacy.
I always thought people used the term “dumbphone” to refer to old-fashioned devices that are just a phone and don’t run any OS.
even all old Nokias and flipphones and the like have an OS they’re just in house developed proprietary embedded software/firmware not open sourceish like android
its how almost any sufficiently complicated device that uses PCBs works even modern washing machines and such run atleast what it basically a firmware os
Landlines, you mean? I sometimes forget they still exist.
Even a lot of offices have moved to VoIP.
Even a wireless handset landline or a deskphone with functions such as an address book and call history would have a basic firmware OS, but something like rotary phone wouldn’t
Re☎vrn
A world where communication devices are limited to rotaries phones, CLI only terminals that only allow data transfer as SMTP, FTP and BBS traffic over dial-up using acoustic couplers connected to the rotaries handsets, would be a better world
Evil commies want to force you to touch grass, beware!
First they came for the gamers
Unacceptable. I want to be able to telnet.
Ok but the only server you can connect to is that one that plays that ASCII version of star wars in the term
telnet towel.blinkenlights.nlfor anyone who hasn’t experienced this masterpieceNo MUDs? That’s what I used telnet for.
I dunno about better, but it would certainly be a hell of a lot slower. A lot of websites would revert to text only, so perhaps it would be better lol
What web? Gopher and FTP.
How do you think they worked? All cells always had an OS.
That’s kind of the point.
Sure, you can’t do much with them, but by that very fact you also won’t have nearly as much data to be spied on.
Likewise, you can do much more with a smartphone, but that comes with a much higher surface of attack, and you also have to work a lot harder to keep all the data away from spying.
SMS/MMS and the PSTN are completely compromised by multiple governments. Not saying that makes smartphones any better, just be aware.
Yes, not so difficult to spy phone calls and SMS, but it’s way less risky for privacy and security as in Smartphones, full of sensitive data on an OS and tons of apps which logs and spy on you, spreading the information not only to the ISP and govs, but also to private advertising companies and others, which is way worse. Phone lines are way less dangerous for privacy and security as the Internet, log data stored by the ISP are deleted after an max. of three month, data on the internet are forever and can’t be deleted, because they are spreeded everywhere.
At least in my case, I don’t use my Smartphone for other things as for calls, I don’t use any messenger apps nor storing sensitive data on it, desconected GPS and localisation apps. For me smartphones as such are spyware by definition, more if the include AI like they are doing currently.