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Comment by adreamingsoul | Hacker News Reader

So, back to land lines with analog phones?

Serious question, do any phones exist that can fully owned by the user? For a period, I was excited about the Ubuntu phone because of the fact that I could have full control over it. Sad to see that project terminated.

I'm also interested in "dumbphones" that can use CDMA or GSM networks.

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For the majority of the history of land lines and analog phones, the phones and lines were owned by the telephone company, and leased by the consumer. This change happened in 1982, 10 years AFTER mobile phones were invented.

http://www.nytimes.com/1982/12/16/business/new-era-for-the-t...

In fact, some people still lease their phones: https://consumerist.com/2012/04/30/hundreds-of-thousands-of-...

It is a bit disingenuous to say that 1982 was ten years after mobile phones were invented. Technically true, but mobile phones as we know them were not really a thing until mid to late nineties.

Not sure this really changes your point, of course. :) It is funny to see the surprise in people when they hear that you used to lease the phone in your house. Especially if you are like me and detest cable companies for wanting me to do the same with their crap.

> Serious question, do any phones exist that can fully owned by the user?

Many (HTC, Google, ASUS, etc. - NOT Samsung) unlocked android phone can be loaded with a variety of bootloaders and then flashed with the ROM of your choice where you have full root access. Of course without google apps (Google Play Store) your phone isn't all that useful, but you can install google apps ( maybe from a questionable legal/copyright stand point, I don't remember) and have more control over the device.

Not sure if this matches what you mean by fully owned though. Checkout XDA Forums (https://forum.xda-developers.com/) to see what interesting things are out there you can do. There's also LineageOS (https://www.lineageos.org/) formerly CyanogenMod.

Yes, but by unlocking you lose every bit of physical security that device had. Anybody having physical access to your phone can then dump the phone's content to a usb drive in kinutes and without any other tool than a otg cable. The makers of the alternative recovery don't bother (who can blame them, they are volunteers) and the manufacurers don't care to implement a proper bootloader that would support reliable re-locking after installing a modified recovery. Besides that, all this alternative software is distributed binary on shady sharehosters by more or less random people on forums. Not exactly a good basis if you wanted to re-gain trust in your phone.

You can install LineageOS without root / usb debugging enabled

As a user of a recently unlocked Android phone, I just found out that the Netflix app don't even appear on the Google Play store for me anymore.

I suggest to everyone I know to try going a couple of weeks without a smart phone. You can still stay in touch over calls/sms, but is much easier to distinguish useful screentime, as in the time I'm working on a computer versus fluff screentime when I'm feeling awkward or mindlessly scroll feeds. It helped a lot with being present, not being bombarded with notifications and actually valuing communication.

I've seriously contemplated a roll-your-own "dumb phone" solution not only for myself but also for my mother and in-laws (they're all in their 70s). An Adafruit Fona would provide all of the telephonic functionality I'd care about, and then it's just a matter of choice regarding microcontroller, display, etc.

Honestly you can pick up a "dumb" phone for $20 - it just makes calls (and might play an MP3). Building one would be fun, but would it be worth it?

> Building one would be fun, but would it be worth it?

For one, you'd know exactly what was in it.

At that point you're trusting the chipmakers to not have anything funny in there, and trusting the telco to not be doing anything funny with your location or voice information.

Simply getting a featurephone for people in their 70s has one huge problem: T9 text input.

The people I know in their 70's don't text, and never have. Is that uncommon?

Probably not uncommon, but not a universal rule either - my grandmother (in her 80s) texts a reasonable amount.

> So, back to land lines with analog phones?

> Serious question, do any phones exist that can fully owned by the user?

Funny you bring up land lines, considering that those essentially began the trend of operator-owned end-user equipment. See for example Model 500 phone:

> As with most telephones of the time in the United States, the 500-series telephones were owned by the local Bell Operating Company and leased on a monthly basis to customers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_500_telephone

Look up Librem 5. Doesn't exist yet, but might soon.

I was just looking at that. I also learned that the Ubuntu OS is still community driven and has ports for several common phones, like the Nexus and OnePlus One phones.

https://docs.ubuntu.com/phone/en/devices/devices https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Devices

Except the baseband is still a binary blob, rendering your phone just as closed and unsafe as it was before.

It's a relative scale. A binary blob isn't ideal from a security and privacy perspective, though given the nature of radio transmissions used with these devices, there are legitimate arguments in its favour as well. In any case, you're still much better off with a device where that is the only unknown factor than you are with a device where apps routinely spy on you and phone home etc.

Agreed. Unless I build my own telco, I have to rely on them for some aspect of this service.

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