I'm sick and tired of dealing with shitty smartphones, where you either open your asshole and let daddy Google or daddy Apple (you've got full choice, goy!) get constant tracking of all your usage and location and more - or you install community made alternatives, which can stop being supported at any time (that's what happened to my phone with LOS, the supposedly most active and widely supported AOSP-based project) and half of which are maintained by literal poojeets from Hyderabad or something with "you tell me :)" buglists.
Anyway, that's not the issue here. What's a good dumbphone to use instead? Is it possible to find one that can do >GPS and maps >email and absolutely nothing else, no web browser, no built-in tracking to the OS? Or should I just buy a $10 nokia at random and call it a day?
>i want to connect to a cellular network that by it's very function can locate me within a grid of cells, and also connect to location satellites operated by the us military >but I don't wanna be tracked
I'm fine with being tracked by my local telecom operator, who also has no access to any other data of mine. I'm not fine with being tracked by a megacorp like google, who also probably have a shadow profile of me over time including, among other stuff, my captcha solving habits at the very least. >inb4 gubmint will subpoena all data anyway And again giving that to the gubmint, who probably already know most of it through everything from employment records to public transport payments, is completely different from giving it to a private corporation.
Julian Torres
So you're fine with telecoms tracking you, and fine with the government tracking you, and just don't like Google.
Unironically use an iPhone with a mix of Google and Apple, and third party apps. Breaking up your usage between multiple companies makes it much more difficult for any one company to have a coherent profile on your activities.
Levi Torres
Explain how will that break anything up rather than just hand a nearly-complete profile to all of them? Also, explain how if I have an Apple smartphone, I can break anything up away from Apple given that they almost definitely have an equivalent to Play Services of some sort tracking everything?
Justin Green
8810 4g has gps Im p sure its the only one
Blake Powell
Explain how will that break anything up rather than just hand a nearly-complete profile to all of them? Also, explain how if I have an Apple smartphone, I can break anything up away from Apple given that they almost definitely have an equivalent to Play Services of some sort tracking everything?
Two more points: Google already has some data because of its utter pervasiveness on the web, installing smartphone apps won't break anything up but rather will just increase their share of data.
Finally, an iphone is much worse than a dumbphone for my purposes: vastly worse battery life, heavier, vastly more fragile, larger, prone to software obscolesense (have we forgotten the numerous times old iphones have gotten slower? why was this never a problem in the age of nokias and sony ericssons?), even completely outside of the tracking (and price for that matter - and before you immediately condense your entire counter-argument to "poorfag", it's not that I can't afford it, it's that there's a huge difference between $10 and $600 or whatever). And for what benefits? Email and maps. The former of which I can completely do without (laptops exist), so the latter is the only real benefit. And then a bunch of apps and capabilities which I am completely fine with never using.
Hunter Russell
Dumbphones still track you. Best alternative is no phone at all, and use specialized tools for any need (standalone GPS, physical maps) or just wait until you get to an actual fucking computer (email).
Jonathan Jenkins
I can relate to this thread, if only because my dad is being fucked out of a dumbphone. He's been using a Casio flip phone with a qwerty keyboard since 2008 and Verizon is shutting the CDMA network down soon. He's basically being forced to a smartphone (since none of Verizons dumbhones have qwerty) and absolutely doesn't want it.
Cooper Campbell
So why are you so afraid of being tracked? Are you trafficking immigrants or drugs or are you a pedo? They just sell that data and give you ads based on that. On smartphones is not as annoying as on windows 10 tho
Easton Campbell
Fair, but sometimes people want to communicate with you while you're not in any position to use a computer and connect to wifi. Privacy is a spectrum, and this is a position on the spectrum I'm willing to occupy, at least until someone comes up with a librem/pinephone like project that doesn't just allow turning off the baseband, but allows polling to limit tracking potential while still periodically notifying you of telephony-related events.
How about a Blackberry then? While they're pretty much a smartphone, they're rather distanced from the traditional ones, and in a good way in my opinion. I feel like you could use it almost like a dumbphone with few issues, and they haven't been implicated in any major cases of tracking that I know of (unlike even Apple).
Austin Phillips
I've come to the conclusion that all phones need to be treated as burners.
If you need a banking app (it's awful that this is obligatory for some people,) have one phone for that and nothing else and keep it in a faraday bag, or else get a phone with a removable battery and keep it out all all times. (I'm looking at getting a Nokia 2.2 for the latter option.)
Another phone for GPS/maps/taxi apps, maybe with a small faraday bag to keep it in when you're not ordering a cab at that exact moment, or just keep the battery in your other pocket. I'm still working out the details.
K9mail is supposedly good, but I do all my email on a laptop.
Ryan Wilson
I have not seen a single ad in years, they're literally just hoovering up the data for no reason. If they kept it in a perfectly secure vault and only attempted to use it to (unsuccessfully) show ads and never gave it to third parties or were at risk of a breach, I'd be fine with it. Unfortunately, even the CIA wasn't able to keep their state of the art tools secure, and the entirety of the online ad system is completely fucked and there will necessarily be dozens of entities with extremely questionable data handling practices looking at my data. I don't want some schizo in AdTechCorpFoo being able to profile my living habits, no thank you.
Justin Wood
They can wait. The lack of fucking patience and this stupid need for immediacy in modern society is a cancer that's really tearing our society apart. Things were much better when we didn't have fucking phones, and it wasn't all that fucking long ago, either. People act like phones have been mainstay for a long time and are fucking essential to modern life, when they're anything but. They are spyware tracking device garbage pushed onto us by corporations and governments who want to categorize, listen in, and control us, and by giving in, you are part of the problem.
Adrian Mitchell
Alright sure but sometimes my mom just wants me to pick up bread on the way home from work and for all the virtues of patience and solitude I would like her to be able to do that. Also, if say she wanted to talk to me even when I was sitting at home, I'd have to keep a PC constantly open. That seems to be making the problem worse than just having a small phone with no internet connection.
Samuel Jackson
All this information is accumulating, and maybe in a decade or two it'll be fed into an AI that can make predictions about your behavior. Yours or anyone else's. AI kind of invalidates the accusation of paranoia. Paranoid people believe they are personally being targeted; AI targets everyone indiscriminately, because it can collect data on everything.
Jordan Bailey
We're lazy now that we have this anti-technology and can't plan ahead and think that nothing can be done after the fact. Either anticipate needing bread or go back to the damn store when you get home. Also, we used to have payphones so people can call you at home when you're out. What a concept. There is NO REASON -- NONE -- that we should sacrifice our fucking privacy for a little bit of fucking convenience. End of fucking discussion. Anyone who thinks otherwise needs serious fucking help because they've been brainwashed.
Nathan Ross
>numerous times old iphones have gotten slower >newer features and eye-candy don't require CPU time and storage.
>batterygate That's a different situation.
James Martinez
>>numerous times old iphones have gotten slower >>newer features and eye-candy don't require CPU time and storage. What are you even trying to say with this? Are you trying to justify the slowness with "newer features and eye-candy"? Because that just makes it worse. I want a PHONE, and at best, also a GPS. I do NOT need a web browser, I do NOT need half a million apps to do half a million things I don't need to do in the first place, and I absolutely fucking categorically do not need shitty fucking animations, transitions, transparency, and other """"eye-candy"""" when this shit comes at the cost of making everything slower and killing the battery.
>>batterygate More like the "batterygate" of the entire smartphone industry where not needing to recharge every day is some kind of crowning achievement, and "a week's charge" is such a pipe dream that there's literally no tech in the works to allow it that isn't quasi-scifi.
Luis Fisher
Just get a GPS that doesn't have a cellular connection and has to get updates by hooking it up to your pc and combine it with the cheapest prepaid dumbphone you can find. Checking email twice a day is more than enough for most jobs and you can do it behind your pc/laptop.
Mason Adams
>cant reverse engineer the cell towers to ensure theres nothing going on
Yep, thats it. As soon as technology comes out that cant be reverse engineered by us Jow Forumsmen its all done. Anything that cant be fully reverse engineered is botnet FBI aay tech.
I'm pissed off that Australia killed all of the 2g networks so I can't use my fucking 3410 over here. Looks like I'm going to have to invest in a banana phone or the modern 3310.
Pic related, it's my brick/Nokia Composer/Snake playing machine.
