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The headline is a bit misleading he got rid of ALL phones and says he will buy a Linux phone when available. Which makes no sense because there are Linux phones
by BoredPositron 1y ago
The headline is a bit misleading he got rid of ALL phones and says he will buy a Linux phone when available. Which makes no sense because there are Linux phones available and they still have the same problems he complains about in his initial paragraph. He still uses a sim but in a stationary devices. Which makes it likely he is most afraid of being tracked while on the go. I would have gone for a pure sip solution personally. If he uses a normal carrier or a sip product doesn't change anything but makes the setup easier. If he uses a burner sim it doesn't make sense to deploy it at home. Which also makes his IMEI/IMSI dancing obsolete. Could be a nice setup deployed in the wild but makes no sense at home. Lots of question marks tbh.
- swader999 1y agoNo kidding and it seems like he went to PhD levels of complexity in this exercise.
- JKCalhoun 1y agoAgree. The simpler solution, I keep coming back to, get a "Faraday bag" and keep your phone in it. Pull the phone out only when you need it. If you still want PhD levels of complexity then I suppose you can try to be very methodical about where/when you "unbag" your smart phone so as not to reveal too much information about your habits, locale.
- skrebbel 1y agoWhat's the faraday bag for? I mean, can't you just turn the phone off? Or even just put in on airplane mode?
- JKCalhoun 1y agoI have read (without citations) that those measures are not enough. Off is not "off", Airplane Mode is at the discretion of the OS, pulling the SIM still leaves other radios on the device available, etc.
- swader999 1y agoI've put an emf meter up to my phone in airplane mode and it doesn't emit anything at least.
- thenthenthen 1y agoOh I need to try this! I just developed a super sensitive giga broadband detector. I am sure it will pick up something, thanks for the reminder!
- dredmorbius 1y agoThere are several issues with the Faraday bag approach: - Your (mainstream, commercial, surveillance-capitalism-AI-feeding moloch) smartphone remains a massive privacy / surveillance / manipulation threat. - Odds are strong that you'll be leaving a strong location and travel signal by where and when you choose to unbag your device. Or bag it, if that occurs only near specific locations you intend to make private, effectively circling the area with a large, red "don't look here" sign. - Your contacts list, contact history, activity, and data remain on what is primarily a surveillance tool to be used against you. The approach taken here, in isolating the cellular network point-of-contact to a modem/router, which can reidentify itself (BSSID) and swap SIMs (this ... should be sufficient to break chain-of-event tracking, though you might find yourself burning through SIMs rather quickly), and relying on other, more-trusted devices for actual communications (voice, SMS (ugh!), Signal (much better), etc., is one I've been exploring for similar reasons. Suggested in a recent HN comment here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45604692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45604692>. Yes, it's more than a slight PITA, but such is the experience of swimming upstream.
- seba_dos1 1y agoPersonally I don't really care about tracking and I use it more as a power saving measure, but FWIW on my Librem 5 cutting the modem out of power is just a matter of a single flick of a switch on the side of the phone, making it trivial to use the modem only at will and keep the device WiFi-only otherwise.