Privacy

31850 readers

125 users here now

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.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

[Matrix/Element]Dead
Discord

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Question about phones: Am I overreacting? (linux.community)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

43 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I don't like so called smartphones (flashy devices to mine your data and other reasons) but my regular no touchscreen phone's microphone is no longer working as it should, making conversations difficult.

Enter a smartphone I received as a present, my phobia (for lack of a better word) to smartphones and my (misguided?) obsession with privacy: I don't want to use this smartphone as my default phone because I'm scared the carrier, ISP or google are going to mine my data and trace my calls.

Which might be an overreaction, because each time I use my regular cell phone, the carrier knows when I'm calling from, who I'm calling and how long the call lasts.

So I ask you: how much more data would I be leaking if I use my new smartphone for calls only, compared to a regular, no touchscreen phone?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Your concern is well reasoned. A smartphone is a much larger risk surface compared to an application specific dumb phone. Running an entire operating system, increases the number of exploitive holes you could be running it anytime. You're almost guaranteed to be running at-risk software.

You can mitigate that risk, by using graphene as people have discussed. But if you truly don't care, get another dumb phone. It's hard to exploit the remotely, it's hard to install software remotely, Pegasus doesn't try target them. It's a smaller risk surface.

That being said, if you want some of the benefits of a smartphone. You can do so limiting your risk surface. Run stock Android, or graphene,. Make sure you're okay with the permissions you provide. And most importantly keep your software up to date. That's a reasonable level of paranoia versus utility trade-off