Lately I have been thinking of what is the better choice do higher privacy result. After Asus abandoned for over 5 months possibility to unblock bootloader I do not believe that it will be support by custom roms very long. I have lost interest in reinstalling the phone, however I still have very limited trust to Google Android not to iOS living in the smartphones. Do you think that Nokia feature phone with Nokia Series 30+ could solve the issue of privacy on the phone?
I know it could seem quite inconvenient but most of the privacy issues on smartphones are connected with improving convenience at whatever cost. Has anyone tried living with a dumb phone these days?
It works for someone I know very well. You have to accept quite some tradeoffs from my perspective. He does not look at it as tradeoffs but as gains. So it really depends on what you (think) you need or want from a “phone”.
Tried it but does not work for me as (for the time being) the “real + original phone function” has become only one among many other functions that I got used to and value enough to accept the need to tinker around with custom rom and such in order to protect some privacy… strange days we live in
Phone calls can be listened to by third parties.
SMS can be read by third parties.
Having no ability to run end to end encrypted messaging services to replace the above functions would, in that respect, make a feature phone less private. De-googled phones, running /e/ OS or one of the alternatives, is the way to go.
I like feature / dumb phones. I’d do it for the peace of mind instead of privacy though, it cuts off lots of complexity. Some of it arguably useful (public transport, maps while travelling, podcast/music), but alas…
agreed
I’d say it’d be more private rather in the sense that you cut away all the rest of functions (incl. data traffic) or as @tcecyk puts it: complexity
I can understand your points but my current situation is that I have two phones to choose to use:
Google Android smartphone without possibility to unlock bootloader but running Signal and Session messengers
Nokia Series 30+ dumb phone with 4G network possibility.
For the moment this is my only choice as for buying anything else I have to collect money first.
What out of above two is more private in your opinion?
I see, now I get your point… as with regards to functions a sheer “phone” seems to cover your usecase (?) I’d pick the dumb phone.
OR - depending on your needs - in order to avoid being tracked best as possible dig into (and install/use) dns-blocking-apps like e.g. nextDNS or firewall like netguard and use the google phone with foss apps from fdroid etc. wherever possible instead of proprietary apps from goigle-store… That’s a decent option as well
