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Where is the investment into a real smart phone that protects your privacy. I'd pay a premium for this, especially if the manufacturing and resources used fair
by Circlecrypto2 2y ago
Where is the investment into a real smart phone that protects your privacy. I'd pay a premium for this, especially if the manufacturing and resources used fair labor.
- robcohen 2y agoI'm very confident this just isn't possible. If you want something with 4G/5G, you just cannot get open hardware. Without open hardware this is a moot point. There are a number of projects where you can use RISC-V hardware with 2G and even 3G open source hardware, but calling them equivalent in any way to an Android or iPhone is a... stretch. I think the issue is the patents with the hardware needs to run out, but by then 6G or 7G will be out and you'll have the same problem. Anything with DMA that isn't closed source cannot be trusted. I'll die on that hill. Even with projects like PinePhone, the best they can do is a privacy switch that turns off the modem. It's just not good enough to take it seriously.
- JPLeRouzic 2y agoI don't think it's a question of open hardware: To send a phone call to your phone, the mobile network must know the BTS/eNodeB/GnodeB associated with your phone. While this is a large surface in rural areas and older technologies, it's not the same in urban/newer technologies. It could easily be associated with a given building. To protect our location, it would need something akin to a mobile proxy that would relay the communication but to my knowledge, there are no such things for mobile communications. And this is not really secure, it's just outsourcing security to another entity which may be be compromised. (I am quite rusty, but I was a telecom engineer)
- TheGlav 2y agoApple is the closest you get today. You can even pay a premium for it!
- BiteCode_dev 2y agoGiven apple was part of PRISM and, you only pay premium for the pr.
- aucisson_masque 2y agoI'm apple hater but you got to recognize they do better at privacy than Google. If you care about the NSA, then you better not have any phone. Whatever it's a android, iphone, grapheneos, anything. Israel blowing up pagers is a proof that nothing is impossible to them. But if you want to say fuck off to the big data harvester like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and so on.. then apple isn't bad at all. You just got to deal with the usual apple bullshit, no side loading, repairability, thunderbolt charger, no headphone jack, etc.
- akimbostrawman 2y ago>do better at privacy than Google so instead of an actual improvement just settle for second least worst? ironically google pixels are 100 times more private than any apple device will ever be because you can securely run your own 100% controlled open source OS such as grapheneos.org which is an actual private as in feature not marketing OS.
- JPLeRouzic 2y agoA phone has several levels of software and hardware, the OS that the user knows is not in charge of communications, its main role is to interface the user to the computer inside the phone. The phone OS sees the phone communication hardware akin to the way it sees an Ethernet card. The phone communication hardware (named baseband modem) is also under control of the SIM and every time the mobile operator wants to change the behavior of the baseband modem it can through the Sim toolkit.
- akimbostrawman 2y agosadly firmware is a bitch on almost any modern device. good thing it can more or less be isolated from the OS https://grapheneos.org/faq#baseband-isolation https://grapheneos.org/faq#baseband-isolation
- OutOfHere 2y agoA degoogled phone with off-switches for wifi and GPS go a long way.
- pintxo 2y agoHow big is the market for that? I’d probably get one as well, but who else would?
- barbazoo 2y ago> Where is the investment into a real smart phone that protects your privacy. I'm just guessing it just doesn't make financial sense to develop one.