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

  • communism@lemmy.ml
    311·
    27 days ago

    I think you’re conflating security with privacy. Not that they are unrelated, but something can be e.g. unencrypted but lack telemetry.

    Not that dumbphones are inherently private, but I don’t think they’re less private either. They’re just what you use if you have no need for all the smartphone functions.

    • PolarKraken@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      81·
      27 days ago

      Idk, being locked in to using only communication protocols that are known to be roughly wide open seems like kind of a privacy non-starter, right? Sort of fails the attempt before you even start, no?

      Edit: a wiser person than me reads the rest of the thread before a comment like the above, but I’m not them sadly. (AKA, plenty of good points made by others)

      • communism@lemmy.ml
        7·
        27 days 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.