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It's time to upgrade my phone. I'm paying $80 a year on Page Plus (Verizon) with a Window 6.x phone (before tiles, has a start menu). I'm trying to find a phone which will keep my data safe and that seems far more difficult and expensive than it should, so I'm asking you, my fellow purple people eaters Soylentils, to aid me in my mundane quest. My primary use will be GPS/navigation, listening to podcasts, and making phone calls. A secondary use is managing email from multiple accounts. I do require the Google Voice app as I have a couple phone numbers from two side businesses. I'd like to be able to toggle between a VPN connection and a normal connection, but that's not a requirement. I prefer longer battery life. My Win phone can go over a week without charging if I all I do on it is make phone calls. I'm going to be living on a college campus so WiFi will normally be available. I don't want to be buying a new phone every couple years. I've had the Win phone for perhaps 6 years.
IPhones have been in the news for being difficult for state-actors to hack into, but app permissions and data can't be faked nor do I know of any OSS movement on the iOS platform. I assume Androids can be instantly cracked by state-actors, but they have some end-user programs to help prevent apps from spying on you. I'd like it if my address book, location, and media was secure from data mining apps. Do I really need to make the choice between data privacy and state privacy? Though since companies have no issue selling data to the state, is my only choice data privacy?
My ideal choice would be a pocket sized piece of hardware that runs Debian, makes phone calls, lets me install standard Linux programs, and doesn't cost more than a laptop. Though if I can connect a screen and keyboard to it and do Python/Java/C++ development then perhaps I'll pay high-end laptop prices. I've seen failed attempts at creating such a device but no successful ones.
Help me dear readers, you're not my only hope.
(Score: 2) by cosurgi on Monday November 13 2017, @04:53PM (1 child)
The OP has a great question. And I so much hope that sometime it would have a better answer than it has currently. I look forward very much towards https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=17/11/12/1250234 [soylentnews.org] and it is very saddening right now that the options are so little right now and the open source way is so difficult to follow. The worst though is a battery life. And none of the producers seem to be aware of that! I have iphone 5s right now, and battery hardly lasts 10hours, and that's normal - it was even replaced on warranty (twice) due to "battery issues", but that didn't help. Routinely I have to enable "battery conservation mode" and have most apps denied the right to run in backgroud, especially siri must be disabled. Sometimes it discharges before I get back home from work. Before I switched to those fancy smartphones I had some super old brickphone nokia 33?? and its battery lasted roughly two weeks.
The "walled garden" hurts. But I prefer that iOS has every app sandboxed. Sure there are vulnerabilities, and due diligence applies, though they are not as widespread as on android. Also it's nearly impossible to update android phone to the latest version of OS. Seriously I tried, and my relative is stuck with an android 5.1.2 or something (don't remember now, but there was soylentnews article about this vulnerability a month back), the latest one with that unpatched serious kernel vulnerability. And there's nothing I could do about that without wasting about 50hours. The iOS updates sure have their own problems, but usually they don't require 50hours, 1hour tops, just like aptitude update; aptitude dist-upgrade takes 2hours tops. Yeah, hacking android is good, but I have limited time on my hands - so I prefer debian over android. And sure I look forward towards a debian based phone.
Regarding privacy, you can block every app separately in settings->privacy to not have access to anything. You just have to deny by default everytime an app asks for permissions (thankfully they have to ask, the OS denies access otherwise). So apps can get really confused without having access to some stuff, this can get funny sometimes, then the app gets uninstalled ;)
About email client - I recommend "Spark" it's a good one. You can configure it to connect to your own email server which you could have configured at home (maybe squirrelmail or roundcube on debian ;)), then you are more private than with usual email clients. Because it doesn't "send telemetry data" like all other email clients do. Also they have a decent support, they might even help with configuring your stuff. If you go this way, then still spark is a good email client, with which just like with any other email client your privacy goes out of the window. I wish that weren't true.
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(Score: 2) by cosurgi on Monday November 13 2017, @04:57PM
lol, forgot a "not" i critical place ;) Should be "If you do NOT go this way (of privacy), then still spark is a good email client"
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#\ @ ? [adom.de] Colonize Mars [kozicki.pl]
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