Oddbean new post about login | logout Anybody here here did research on best available phones for privacy? Privacy oriented phones seems to be the least developed area in the privacy-oriented tech world. Am I wrong? I understand that how private a phone is depends on several factors (not just the HW, OS and installed apps but also using a sim card, cell towers.. ) and the more things you want to use your phone for, the more impossible true phone-related privacy becomes but is anybody even *really* trying?
I have a burner phone with pay as you go sim and a series of grapheneos phones with no sim that tether to the burner phone and use tor. Each phone is for a different app, one for email, one for browsing, one for messaging. Each time I read an email or a message, or browse to a new webpage I destroy the phone after using a custom built thermite incineration case. It's expensive but they haven't caught me yet.
Privacy on phones is a gauge whose end is a purely subjective good-enough based on present knowledge - If you grow in the field, the gauge keeps growing.. Switch to an open-source privacy-focused OS. Then ditch any big-tech eco-system, ditch most apps, find open-source alternatives, and self-host whatever you can, whatever needs to be self-hosted. Put as much of your inbound and outbound data under your own control.
In my Opinion a Oneplus 6 with PostmarketOS (real Mainline Linux) and Gnome Edge is by far the most secure and best possibility right now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOmRMg546UY In Future it will be libre-soc.org or the Company-Spin-off from RedSemiconductor.com. The Cool Thing is that there are even Anti-Temper-Circuits in there and you have Control over Ring -3, Meaning Full-Hardware Control over every single Transistor. Except things like pcie ddr... which are still hard-makros. But by Far the most private and secure chip in the World. Also it is does not have any Accelerator at all. Meaning everything is done by the CPU-Cores and Controlled by you but extremly efficiant. Simd at the Developer-End gets automaticly Vectorised. No Opcode-Proliveration, no Overhead between CPU and Accelerator (GPU,VPU etc), no tear-up and tear-down cases, sec-fault on boundary etc. The Team is Centered around Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton. lkcl on that stupid censored Platform named Youtube. Search for libre-soc on his Channel or Playlist. Also It is getting ratified by IBM right now. All Open-Source Hardware and Software! Check out libre-soc.org and their mailing-lists for more information.
Pixel with Graphene is as good as you're going to get. Which is pretty good in my experience.
I have one. My only complaint is two months or so ago they my battery started to last much less. Usually it lasted 1.5 days. Now it doesn't last even one full day. Using pixel 5a
Why would anyone concerned about privacy use a Google phone?? It's not just the OS that matters, it's the device, too, right? Am I missing something?
It's not a Google phone. Baseband and OS get rewritten with de-googled FOSS software. Graphene on a Pixel is THE way to get privacy on a mobile right now. If your threat model includes not trusting the HW modems, CPUs, RAM then I'm sorry... you're fucked buddy.
Are we talking about *phones* or about gadgets? If you're in the same hemisphere as me, I can give you a hint about *phones* with autonomous IMEI editing capabilities, mostly CAT or Alcatel branded, like CAT B40 or Alcatel 3025X. Combine this with anonymous prepaid SIMs like LycaMobile and you're good to go. If we're talking about *gadgets* then your best bet is either Graphene'd Pixel with anon eSIM like silent.link and/or a dedicated data-only WiFi-enabled modem and using SIP numbers for actually calling somewhere, or a very hard way of picking and debloating a smartphone with editable IMEIs and then see the first part of my post.