Where is the investment into a real smart phone that protects your privacy. I'd pay a premium for this, especially if the manufacturing and resources used fair labor.
I'm very confident this just isn't possible. If you want something with 4G/5G, you just cannot get open hardware. Without open hardware this is a moot point. There are a number of projects where you can use RISC-V hardware with 2G and even 3G open source hardware, but calling them equivalent in any way to an Android or iPhone is a... stretch.
I think the issue is the patents with the hardware needs to run out, but by then 6G or 7G will be out and you'll have the same problem. Anything with DMA that isn't closed source cannot be trusted. I'll die on that hill.
Even with projects like PinePhone, the best they can do is a privacy switch that turns off the modem. It's just not good enough to take it seriously.
I don't think it's a question of open hardware: To send a phone call to your phone, the mobile network must know the BTS/eNodeB/GnodeB associated with your phone.
While this is a large surface in rural areas and older technologies, it's not the same in urban/newer technologies. It could easily be associated with a given building.
To protect our location, it would need something akin to a mobile proxy that would relay the communication but to my knowledge, there are no such things for mobile communications. And this is not really secure, it's just outsourcing security to another entity which may be be compromised.
I'm apple hater but you got to recognize they do better at privacy than Google.
If you care about the NSA, then you better not have any phone. Whatever it's a android, iphone, grapheneos, anything. Israel blowing up pagers is a proof that nothing is impossible to them.
But if you want to say fuck off to the big data harvester like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and so on.. then apple isn't bad at all.
You just got to deal with the usual apple bullshit, no side loading, repairability, thunderbolt charger, no headphone jack, etc.
Your privacy is as strong as your weakest Link. NSA only need one a few vulnerability to be able to monitor what you do, it may be on chip maker, network provider, operating system, compiler, etc..
That's a lost battle, if they want to see what you do, they do and there is nothing one can do but force them legally not to do so.
I am sure there is a name for this fallacy, but being better yet not enough at something where bar for reaching privacy is so high isn't cutting it. The result is the same, sans warm fuzzy feeling not anchored in sad reality of 2024.
so instead of an actual improvement just settle for second least worst? ironically google pixels are 100 times more private than any apple device will ever be because you can securely run your own 100% controlled open source OS such as grapheneos.org which is an actual private as in feature not marketing OS.
A phone has several levels of software and hardware, the OS that the user knows is not in charge of communications, its main role is to interface the user to the computer inside the phone. The phone OS sees the phone communication hardware akin to the way it sees an Ethernet card. The phone communication hardware (named baseband modem) is also under control of the SIM and every time the mobile operator wants to change the behavior of the baseband modem it can through the Sim toolkit.
Believing the software can somehow be separated from the hardware is a lie. They can mitigate at best the the amount of information one can extract but at the end whoever control the hardware can have access to extremely private information.
A gyroscope sensor is able to accurately record what one say close to his phone. It doesn’t even need Android to run he has access to private information.
And if you've missed it, note the prior "verified contact" key exchange added to iMessages, as well as the "sorry we can't read your backups to help you recover your data" security added to iCloud (provided you only use devices up-to-date and opted in). This one is a customer service nightmare, they added it anyway.
All that said, this article is less interesting since (a) if your cell phone uses a telco, "they" know where you are, and where you've been, no Apple needed; and (b) unlike Apple segmenting your Maps directions to prevent themselves from knowing where you are going, Google's always been about your location.
Apple was caught issuing issuing OCSP queries (hello, XKEYSCORE) every time an app was launched, promised to stop logging and build an opt-out, then reneged and memory-holed the promise.
Why? Apart from state sponsored violation of privacy, I think Apple does in fact provide the best privacy protections. I’m also happy they don’t do bizarre things like Android sometimes does, for example preventing you from taking screenshots on your own device because an app can do that on Android.
However, I dislike Apple for their extortionist approach to defending the App Store duopoly, browser access, moderation/censorship on apps, etc.
They are a for-profit company. They are closed-sourced both in hardware and software. Their ecosystem is known to be a walled garden. They aren't open in their processes. They sell your data, they just don't tell you. Following all of their ToS you have to agree to use their devices - you don't even own anything, you are just paying for a subscription (that can be revoked any time for any reason) to use the device.
