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

  • EveryMuffinIsNowEncrypted@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    0·
    27 days ago

    With dumbphones, you’re usually limited to regular phone calls or SMS/MMS messaging.

    That’s kind of the point.

    Sure, you can’t do much with them, but by that very fact you also won’t have nearly as much data to be spied on.

    Likewise, you can do much more with a smartphone, but that comes with a much higher surface of attack, and you also have to work a lot harder to keep all the data away from spying.