Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

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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'Dumbphones' Are Not Private (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) by freedickpics@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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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

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
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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[–] bad_news@lemmy.billiam.net 4 points 1 day ago

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.