Ask HN: Privacy Conscious Mobile Phone Options? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Privacy Conscious Mobile Phone Options?

2 pointsProgrammatic5 comments

I'm reaching the end of the useful lifetime of my current phone and am looking into alternatives. I've grudgingly accepted that at present, privacy and mobile phone usage are antithetical but I'm trying to do my best to reduce my exposure. I'm interested in the factors that HN users weigh when deciding on a particular phone.

Some of mine so far are:

* Ability to install community-trusted OS (currently use and lean toward Cyanogen, open to alternatives)

* Ability to connect to Exchange for work email (currently use Touchdown to provide its own container to prevent work from having the ability to wipe the whole phone)

* Reasonable cost - would prefer to be in the realm of $200 instead of $600, although compelling devices

Any completely out of the box suggestions to accomplish same are welcome too, I'm not 100% tied to the use of a mobile phone through a telco but do want the ability to communicate with the rest of the world.

What phone/solution do you use, and what factors drove you to it?

You don't really want this.

No amount of dedication or care will provide you the level of privacy you believe to want.

You will waste time and energy, to ultimately come up with a greatly inferior user experience.

You might believe this is going to bring you peace of mind, but I predict it will only contribute to the paranoia.

I recommend you accept and embrace transparency. Privacy will only keep getting more and more expensive, while transparency is bringing much more value and opportunities than privacy ever could.

I will be happy to help you find a phone once you identify realistic needs (of which privacy isn't one).

Unless you're a spy, in which case carry on.

I appreciate the reply, but we don't currently have transparency. We have the aggregators and the aggregated, and those doing the aggregating jealously guard their own privacy. If transparency was truly a reachable goal I would embrace it, but I don't find it to be realistic outcome.

Do you have an operator in mind? It's no good having a perfect, Stallman-esque, phone if all your communication is through a mobile phone operator in cahoots with the government, is it?

I currently use T-Mobile, and welcome any advice you have regarding the choice of operators. The question you pose is a sticky one, and why I note that privacy and mobile phone usage are antithetical. I understand that the metadata/content of voice/mms/sms communications, location info (tower info), and the content of your data communications will always be the domain of the telco and there's no solution to that problem other than abstaining.

I'm not sure how I feel about that thorny issue, and it is almost enough to make me forgo a mobile phone. However, I believe that I derive more value from the ability to communicate than I lose by making that data available to the telco and anyone they cooperate with.

Therefore my goals for privacy are to accept that landscape but try to limit which arbitrary other entities get additional data from my mobile phone usage. I attempt to limit the following things where feasible: oversharing from applications, tracking by other entities such as Google/Apple/etc, installed applications to those providing the best tradeoffs, and the amount of plaintext communication from the phone.

I wish opportunistic end-to-end voice/sms/mms encryption was mainstream, that alone would mitigate a large amount of privacy concerns.

In the same way you gain more from communicating via NSA partners, you may gain more from communicating via hardware and software made by NSA partners. Build an app, a copy of something basic like Whatsapp would solve your text needs and let you have a normal smartphone. Do the same for voice with your own SIP servers.

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