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 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks 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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[–] communism@lemmy.ml 7 points 3 weeks ago

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.