this post was submitted on 12 May 2023
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Privacy
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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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The simplest way is to not own one. Get a land line and an answering machine instead. It's ok to not be reachable every minute of every day.
Is it eeally that much safer vs running Graphene? I'm sincerely curious as I don't know the specific benefits of a landline vs a secure ROM.
It depends on what you mean by safer.
Active cellular devices are location tracked. That information is correlated and sold. There's nothing GraphenOS, or any other on device software can do to stop that.
When you carry a connected cellular device, you're not only reporting your own location, you're being tracked in reference to other people that are also carrying a cellular device. Between the two, it's a detailed map of your lifestyle and people you know or may know.
A land line reduces the tracking to a single location, and the people you communicate with on it. Personally I avoid the land line too unless there's no other good option.
For private communication, there is Jabber (XMPP), Matrix, and other self hosted services that avoid the entire issue.
If you really need communication on the road, then there are a couple of services that provide cellular connectivity without personal information. It's not ideal, but better than nothing.
I'm writing all this from the perspective of the US. Other jurisdictions may be different, but location tracking is ubiquitous as far as I know.
There's not really that much you can do about it if you're on a cell phone. Your phone is connecting to the cell tower, and at that point all bets are off on how metadata gets used.
Adding on to what Grouchy already said (good post) :
@shreddy_scientist @Grouchy Any device connected to a wireless technology lacks full security and privacy.
You might carry on your mobile phone with you as there are lots of other functions you can do on it. But, in order to benefit from full privacy and security you should disable: cellular modem, wifi, bluetooth, nfc, uwb. And you must run an operating system that is entirely open source to be sure that these components stay off after you disabled them.
@shreddy_scientist @Grouchy You might also have a look at mobile phones that offer electrically kill switches or can even have these components physically removed. E.g: Pinephone PRO, Librem 5, Fairphone 4
There is no such thing as "full security and privacy". It doesn't exist and it's not a useful goal.
Security and privacy don't exist as absolute values. Things are not universally more or less secure than other things. You need to understand things like the needs of a situation (e.g. you correctly pointing out a modern phone has more use-cases than a landline), who the threats are, and what their capabilities are. Putting a decent password on an iPhone makes it adequately private and secure against my parents. Using a landline is not adequately secure against a government agency. Know Your Enemy!
As for your advice, a quick counter:
@comfy Indeed you need context, but let's limit the concept "full security and privacy" to aspects that are under your control. E.g you might control the physical security of your phone, but you might not control how many men-in-the-middle are between you and the rest of the internet. Like any regular technology user my threat actors are big-tech and establishments.