Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Question about phones: Am I overreacting? (linux.community)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

41 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I don't like so called smartphones (flashy devices to mine your data and other reasons) but my regular no touchscreen phone's microphone is no longer working as it should, making conversations difficult.

Enter a smartphone I received as a present, my phobia (for lack of a better word) to smartphones and my (misguided?) obsession with privacy: I don't want to use this smartphone as my default phone because I'm scared the carrier, ISP or google are going to mine my data and trace my calls.

Which might be an overreaction, because each time I use my regular cell phone, the carrier knows when I'm calling from, who I'm calling and how long the call lasts.

So I ask you: how much more data would I be leaking if I use my new smartphone for calls only, compared to a regular, no touchscreen phone?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

If your concern is whether your cellphone carrier has the ability to see who you are calling and for how long, this is true whether you have a smartphone or a “regular” phone.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

With a regular phone they can also fairly accurately tell where you are, and read your texts. The main difference is the information goes to the carrier but not straight to Google or Apple.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

They can do so with a smartphone too, they both use the same cellular network, so same voice calls, same plain-text text messages (SMS is a feature of the cellular network management, messages are injected into the cell management frames).

Even worse, smartphones use AGPS, so download from AGPS servers (providing another point of location data) and using that ephemeris data to improve location update times.