this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2025
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Privacy
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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.