From the context of your previous comments, it seemed like you were talking not about not having a mobile phone in general, but rather a SIMless phone. Using it over Wi-Fi only is indeed doable - but you’d need an Airplane Mode on an OS you can trust, just having no SIM would not be enough.
Also no, I did not have such a job - I don’t understand how this question relates to the conversation.
I really wish I could use Vanadium as my main browser, but two downsides are really noticeable: a) adblocking is not as good as with Ublock Origin (for example, on TVTropes the ads themselves were removed but not the HTML elements they used to be in) and b) the multiple-choice search engine turned out to be quite important for me. So a Firefox fork it is.
I doubt any FOSS restriction is doable at all. As for the supply chain - xz showed this is indeed possible… But no one can guarantee that every encrypted client would be able to get such a well-hidden backdoor, and that it will stay undiscovered, and that it wouldn’t be invalidated with an update… But yeah, the only way this can be combatted is having more eyes on such software.
Maybe Divest/Lineage could be an option instead. Although you have to choose a device wisely (and even among supported ones, some have trouble unlocking the bootloader), there is a chance you’d find a suitable cheaper one.
Personally no regrets spending $300 on a Pixel 7a but still painful to hand over this much.
I encountered this in a computer club (I mean the place where you play per hour to play computer games on a good PC if you lack a suitable one at home). The accounts there were using phone numbers as usernames, and apparently if one is used, it would have to be verified. However, after refusing I was just given one-time accounts every time (with a random string of digits as the username), I just couldn’t save unspent time for another visit so had to pay precisely. Funnily enough, the host herself the first time mentioned one-time phone number rental services for this reason)
If I understand correctly, you can prohibit non-e2e messages on your server .
This is not binary like this either. There are a TON of variables.
- You can have the IPs you communicate with visible to your ISP directly, or hidden from an ISP but visible to a VPN, or hidden from ISP but visible to the Tor network, the safety of which depends on “against whom”.
- You can have your messages encrypted in transit but visible to the messaging server, or encrypted end-to-end and thus useless to the messaging server too.
- You can have the identity you post under bound to an identity outright, or you could obfuscate that.
- You can use a centralized messenger that has your whole communication graph and all metadata, or you can use a federated one with multiple identities and thus metadata scattered across multiple places. Or Briar that doesn’t have servers at all.
All depends on whom you want to be private against, as well as how much effort they want to put into getting your information. There is no “absolute privacy”… But there is “requiring more effort from the chosen adversary than you’re worth”.
How tf do you even do that? I get how you would on a stock proprietary OS. But there are open OSes, and then how? Doubt something this complex and autonomous could be hidden like the XZ backdoor. If some OS complies - wouldn’t people fork it to remove the malware?
And then there are desktops, which are much easier and more universal to make private…
Yes, I am aware of such technology - they announced similar capabilities in our existing surveillance system. I know that it is most likely not as advanced as China’s, because that’s how it usually is here. However, it is not clear just how good it is in practice - at least in some cases, they’ve been overselling it (at least in regards to recognizing obstructed faces). So I am not sure just how dangerously accurate said gait recognition is, especially since they have much better facial recognition to depend on.