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Comment by davidu | Hacker News Reader

Since it has a BL-4U removable battery, this will be the phone to get for those of you who are privacy conscious. It's unfortunate it has Bluetooth, but at least no Wi-Fi.

I would have normally written "privacy paranoid" but it's clear that the spectrum has been lowered from paranoid to just conscious due to current realities.

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Privacy conscious? When you first start any S40 phone, it will connect to Nokia servers and push certain data like your location. You wouldn't know because the OS is proprietary. They say this is for statistics but it could be anything. You can't start the phone before you aggree to this happening or before it actually happened. I have tried, really.

This is surprising. And unfortunate if true and unable to disable. Agree that the proprietary nature of the OS is a concern. An android or OSS OS would be preferred here.

But you can turn it really off. The moment you turn a phone on the whole world knows anyway. Or just the NSA if the fishnet order is still valid - the one with the metadata of all calls in the US.

There was some controversy [1] [2] about Nokia decrypting SSL connections for their accelerated browser. Not familiar with their platform, or whether you could remove them, but Nokia proxy certificates are certainly being trusted by default.

If you're this paranoid, build one of those laser cut Arduino GSM phones instead[3]. You could add your own discreet baseband kill switch.

[1] https://gaurangkp.wordpress.com/2013/01/09/nokia-https-mitm/

[2] https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/sjs/how-the-nokia-browser...

[3] http://web.media.mit.edu/~mellis/cellphone/

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