I value the privacy so I don't own or use cellphone.
The main drawback have been that people rarely label apartment doorbells anymore, so if you don't know which button to press you're in trouble. Another is getting hold of old friends if you don't know their email address (I don't have Facebook either).
Overall, I'm fairly content with the situation, and am seriously considering not getting a new one. Another benefit is that I'm more likely to bring my laptop if I go somewhere, and thus when I do connect to the internet and have time to kill, I often get work done instead of mindlessly browsing HN/reddit or playing games.
My phone is indispensable for the kind of work that I do, I literally couldn't do my job without it.
- Async communication (slack/email) can be checked at your computer.
- Voice calls are usually done with your computer anyway.
- If you are on call, an old-fashioned pager can be used.
Frankly, although I do have a smartphone, I wouldn't want a job where I was required to use it, or one where I was expected to be available at all times unless on call.
Does Slack have better uptime than email?
Does the office have redundant ISPs?
And the jobs that require a phone often come with a phone provided. So you still don’t need one yourself.
If I need to participate in on-call rotation or similar, I expect the employer to issue a phone. For a remote job, I will obviously get one myself -- but then strictly for job-related activities.
(by the way, if anyone is looking for an experienced infrastructure engineer/"DevOps" guy, give me a cal...errh email)
You probably don’t realize nor intend this, but that can be a large red flag for your candidacy from the other side of the table, particularly if the role involves security because you’re broadcasting a slight misjudgment of your threat vectors and exposure. The number of resumes most folks go through, expecting ravens from Winterfell will get you dropped fast. Torvalds could probably get away with making initial hailing frequencies that difficult, but you or I should just buy a phone number of some kind, as much as it sucks.
The phone isn’t the problem if you apply opsec correctly, buy the right one, and operate it like a compromise hazard. (It is.)
Anyway, point is, if you need a temporary phone while job hunting, try google voice? I hate google now but this may help temporarily, or maybe you could find a better provider (other than google, that is).
Good luck with the job hunt!
This is a little extreme, but I've started turning off my phone or putting it in airplane mode when not expecting a call.
In addition to not being as distracted, I've had a marked decrease in spam calls - I think they tend to mark phones that repeatedly send them straight to VM as "cold".
It is known that complete operating systems run on every chip on that phone of which you don't have knowledge of or access to.
To think a software security solution provided by an OS, a pretty high-level abstraction when considering hardware, of the ability to turn off the radio is insane in these days and ages.
Furthermore with permanent batteries (or with a backup battery hidden inside) being off to the user doesn't mean anything either.
Assuming such an exploit exists, I don't think I'd be targeted with it. It's my understanding three letter agencies tend to hoard that sort of thing, not blast them at random privacy aficionados.
> the eavesdropping technique "functioned whether the phone was powered on or off."
https://www.cnet.com/news/fbi-taps-cell-phone-mic-as-eavesdr...
I would hope that the FBI would not override airplane mode on a smart phone... what if they did so while a suspect was actually on a plane?
A warrant doesn't give police the right to endanger others IIRC...
Nothing would happen. Just like nothing happens to the thousands of people who forget to switch their phones to airplane mode every day.
I would think a phone with a removable battery would otherwise serve your concerns.
The sentence was about permanent batteries with an aside about how technically a remove-able battery phone could still have power somewhere with it removed.
I leave it off most of the time, but I have to be on-call for my day job every few weeks and can't really not have a phone then and still keep my job.
It's a shame that phones are so closed and proprietary. I looked into changing a phone's IMEI number, and turns out that's illegal in most places and a serious no-no. How can there even be a law like that??
I agree that the vast majority of those that will have trouble are intentionally engaged in illegal activity. But, at any given time, there must be both fair fair number of people who are unintentionally committing illegal acts and those who are falsely believed by law enforcement to be committing illegal acts.
There is an argument to be made that everyone should be more careful about privacy, thereby increasing the cost (and opportunity cost) of invasive investigations and forcing law enforcement to be more selective about the degree of certainty they have before employing more invasive investigation techniques.
1) If you do it from home, the govt already knows where you live, or you can use proxies, or Tor, or a VPN.
2) If you don't do it from home, you are practically anonymous if you change your mac address and use someone else's wireless network, which are ubiquitous today in airports, restaurants, etc.
Which is not retained indefinitely. If you're not committing a crime, that footage will be gone in 30-90 days.
For someone so paranoid about privacy as to not even own a "dumb" phone, I was curious what type of computer/internet setup they would be using to work around all the privacy traps such as broswer fingerprinting, traffic analysis, deep OS and hardware exploits, linguistic analysis, etc. etc.
While it wouldn't erase every hint of your presence, it takes a correlation of data to track someone; disparate trackable info is insufficient.
[1] https://puri.sm/posts/purism-librem-laptops-completely-disab...