Hello all,
I’m looking to switch over to move privacy focused setup, so far i have a VPN, and will be making other changes. Is there any email providers that you know respect privacy, or how one would do this?
You mean getting a privacy-respecting phone? You could get a Pixel with GrapheneOS as one of the most popular options. There are also a number of OSes and phone manufacturers competing in the privacy-concerned market you could look into. Note that privacy is not the same thing as security, and for security, GrapheneOS is the clear winner.
Yes, i am aware security and privacy are different. I want privacy. A cellphone is not going to fix that, but i really have no choice in that matter because i do need access to a phoneline 24/7 due to having children(call from the school). Ideally i would be using a phone without stock android or no android at all, and running a mobile linux distro, and using a voip provider on WIFI only.
Linux phones definitely are a thing, but depending on your threat model, they may not be enough. There isn’t a smartphone which is 100% open-source from all hardware, to firmware, to software. But there’s a variety of phones that are known to run Linux. The Google Pixel 3a is known for working very well with Ubuntu Touch. There’s also the PinePhone, Purism phones, and there will be others too that support “desktop Linux” (specified for pedantry, since Android is also a type of Linux I guess).
You also don’t need a smartphone. They do still sell “dumb mobile phones” that just do SMS and phone calls; I’ve bought some recently. You can get them for really cheap too, like in the range of 20 USD/EUR kind of price. I don’t think that particularly contributes to privacy since these phones are also proprietary and easily backdoored, but I suppose then it’s missing out on much of the spyware that smartphones have installed as software. If it’s location data you’re worried about, sticking it in a faraday cage should be good enough, but if you need to receive unexpected calls that won’t work. If you’re paranoid about the mic recording, while I think that would be an unlikely and unfeasible way of spying, you could also physically block that by putting the phone in something soundproof, but again you’d need some way to hear that the phone is ringing. For camera paranoia just tape over the camera.
