It comes down to the hostile actor you are trying to defend against. If you are Jason Bourne and you have been burned by your agency so multiple nation-states are looking for you, then you have to go fully off-grid and live a quiet life without ever communicating with anyone in your prior life again. It doesn't matter if you are using Signal, or SMS, or even a dial-up BBS. If you are communicating with people that are also under heavy surveillance, you cannot hide.

If you want to reduce your "digital footprint," then not using google/facebook/other social media is the most worthwhile thing you can possibly do. Your phone doesn't matter. Use iOS, never install any of the social apps, use Safari in incognito mode, and you'll never be tracekd across websites again.

Switching from a smartphone to a dumbphone is usually not about increasing privacy in the first place.

People tend to make the switch for mental health reasons, rather than privacy ones. When your phone goes back to being a direct communication tool rather than a passtime, you tend to realize just how much time you spend during a day doing basically nothing.

Pretty sure the Punkt is my next phone and a Raspberry Pi 500+ is my next desktop.

Take me back to the start of the millennium. I'm tired of this shit.

Yes but you also have to get your phone from a hardware manufacturer who you trust, so not google or Samsung or huawei or… etc.

Fair phone maybe?

Fair phone maybe?

Outdated HW and doesn't have graphene support.

Good point. Linux phones, even in their current state, might be a good middle ground for people with low needs.

Although there's two things I'd mostly be worried about.
1. Battery life. Smartphones, including Linux ones, aren't exactly known for amazing battery life. A dumb phone would likely last several times longer on a single charge.
2. Physical durability. Even after all those years of structural improvements, smartphones remain fairly fragile. Usually I use high durability cases with my smartphones (ideally Otterbox Defender), though I don't think anything similar is even available for any Linux phones. And of course, we all know dumb phones are generally durable enough.

Yes, not so difficult to spy phone calls and SMS, but it's way less risky for privacy and security as in Smartphones, full of sensitive data on an OS and tons of apps which logs and spy on you, spreading the information not only to the ISP and govs, but also to private advertising companies and others, which is way worse. Phone lines are way less dangerous for privacy and security as the Internet, log data stored by the ISP are deleted after an max. of three month, data on the internet are forever and can't be deleted, because they are spreeded everywhere.

At least in my case, I don't use my Smartphone for other things as for calls, I don't use any messenger apps nor storing sensitive data on it, desconected GPS and localisation apps. For me smartphones as such are spyware by definition, more if the include AI like they are doing currently.

even all old Nokias and flipphones and the like have an OS they're just in house developed proprietary embedded software/firmware not open sourceish like android

its how almost any sufficiently complicated device that uses PCBs works even modern washing machines and such run atleast what it basically a firmware os

How can you have a private phone with less security?

Edit: Certainly without security you cannot have true privacy

It is simple.

It produces significantly less data. It doesn't have all the apps you are being tracked by reporting on your every move.

It doesn't have faceid, and probably has a lot of exploits (less security), but the data it holds isn't worth securing and it doesn't provide a non-stop datamine (more privacy).

Basically, instead of having a large safe filled with gold, you have a duffel-bag with your old gym clothes. You don't need security for old gym clothes.

They provide internet to your device, which makes them an internet service provider. And if nothing else, they also offer fixed wireless, which makes them an internet service provider.

Sure, Comcast can't log your phone calls because they are a cable or fiber provider, but T-Mobile can absolutely log your calls, and they are still an ISP.

a sufficiently determined government will always be able to access your communications

If you use encrypted messages and both people using the messages have a phone with disk encryption then there is literally no way for a government to gain access to your messages. That is assuming the government isn't going to torture you.

Yes! I hate that companies are trying to make people think thar rooting=unsafe. Then make it work safely. Root user is safe on Linux, then why it isn't on phone?

That's just boils down to user not giving root access to every app.

What I really want to at this point is a pager, a cellular Wi-Fi access point, and an 8" tablet that can run Linux and sip power so I can just pretend I don’t have a device.

This is basically what I was thinking. Where can I find a fully functioning 8" Linux Tablet? I feel like the rest of it is easy peasy.

Edit: In my head, I am imagining a steam deck but with the side controller bits snapped off. Someone pls make this. lol

Idk, being locked in to using only communication protocols that are known to be roughly wide open seems like kind of a privacy non-starter, right? Sort of fails the attempt before you even start, no?

Edit: a wiser person than me reads the rest of the thread before a comment like the above, but I'm not them sadly. (AKA, plenty of good points made by others)

I suppose that begs the question of whether or not privacy (as used by this community) inherently means private in the colloquial sense, like the way a diary is private. Because to me, a e.g. public static website with no kind of profiling of its users is privacy-respecting, but obviously not private in the colloquial sense—it's a public resource.

I do use SMS sometimes and I use it strictly for things that I'm happy to be basically public. Same for using other protocols like unencrypted email.

A stock smartphone is also locked in to mandatory telemetry, like a stock dumbphone. The practical difference is that there's a much smaller community for installing custom FOSS OSes onto dumbphones compared to smartphones.