Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anything on Android is totally moot. You can "turn off locations" but you don't know if it has. It also has a dozen other ways to track you when correlated with others, such as inertial, wifi, cell cgi, audio, magnetic, bluetooth, optical, pressure, etc; some of which are in the baseband and inaccessible to the OS. You can keep it in a faraday bag but it can still record and upload later. Same thing could be said abo…
> If you care about privacy just don't carry a phone. I feel like this position is unrealistic. Privacy is possible with a modern smartphone. Using an alternative OS on Android devices can help facilitate this. I've been using GrapheneOS as a daily driver for nearly six months now. Any issues I've run into have largely been due to my own configuration of the device. You can also get a lot of useful information from M…
Or the broke who can't afford the devices now more and more used against us.
Or those who are willing to forgo the conveniences of such devices in exchange for privacy. Or, simply for the sanity of not having to deal with them.
I'm firmly in the boat of "Could do any or all of those things" - I considered a PinePhone, have a PineBook Pro, could easily do GrapheneOS, and... I'm currently using none of them. I'm using an AT&T Flip IV that I leave at home regularly. If I have some fancy requirement, I can tether a laptop to it.
You start from the assumption that a smartphone of some variety or another is a requirement - and I'll counter that, while it's certainly the default option of modern life, the smartphone is really only a decade old, and there are ways of doing things without it we can go back to - and those things do generally still work.
I'm at a point in my life where both I can be a bit annoying about things like reachability, and, interestingly, I'm hostile enough to tech that people expect me to be a bit weird about things. Nobody was surprised when I showed up with a flip phone - but they were surprised that I still had things like email and Google Maps capability on it (KaiOS). At which point, the gears started turning.
Trying to find a way to de-evil what is looking more and more like a corrupted, user-hostile system through and through doesn't seem worth the time, when one can work towards not requiring people to be in that system in the first place.