This won’t save you, baseband and tower meta analysis hook into palantir’s tracking modules. This is the answer someone who like ricing their machines gives you, all it does is provide an illusion of control and a feeling of being smart.
It's possible you could get away from this if you trust your hardware enough, no? Like with Pinephone and switching all the hard switches off. I just mean for certain time periods where you may need a device but don't want it pinging off anything.
No, meta analysis is done off connections to upstream towers and connections to the cell network. The problem isn’t your device, but the fact the network itself is fully tapped. 4g also uses a symmetric cypher and doesn’t contain e2e communication so once you touch the tower all data is unencrypted within the carrier network. You have problems tracking off Bluetooth, WiFi and the carrier connections and with the carrier connections you have a blob of source code which isn’t controlled by the operating system and is communicated through via an abstraction layer to another device on the carrier side that logs all low layer communication and all high layer communication. Deviations from standard use that the majority of the population performs are also checked as unusual as we learned from the Snowden leaks about people who turn their phones off, so if you and your friend both turn your phones off at the same time for a secret communication it’s listed as an event and can be back correlated if/when you become a person of interest.
Our saving grace is the people using these advanced systems are idiots.
The absence of touching a tower is in itself an action and when compared to population averages stands out like a huge red flag that this person is performing suspicious activity.
The OP is looking for an introduction to free software, so I provided recommendations for what I would give someone looking for that. I wouldn't deride that as being an "illusion of control" or a feeling of "being smart" because of things the user cannot control. The same reason I wouldn't deride a user looking to use Ubuntu or Mint as their first Linux distro. You have to start somewhere, might as well learn in a friendly environment.
To answer your statement though on baseband monitoring, you're right, there's no way to avoid monitoring from the carrier or a third party with a stingray, short of using a phone without a modem in it to connect to a cell tower. No phone on the market has an open source modem either so you can only guess what it's doing since it's all proprietary code. Neither of these reasons would be a reason I would tell OP or any new person to privacy or security to prevent them from learning how to customize their phone or take their privacy back.
OP is looking for a phone focuses on privacy without specifying the target of who they are hiding from. If it’s just commercial entities, an iPhone is the correct choice, if it’s government then things become complicated, if they just want to learn how a phone works then lineage is fine and if they want to figure out how the cell network works they should be using osmoconbb. Their goal is nebulous, they never specified they wanted free software and the answer provided only provides an illusion of privacy and control.
Not specifying the target or not providing a threat model is something a beginner does. I'm trying to help build a bridge, to help the OP bring her power back as she mentioned in the post, and not deriding flawed but good enough options to get them them as "ricing" or acting like this answer is the end of the world because I didn't consider every single potential act of spying and privacy intrusions into my answer for a beginner.
This won’t save you, baseband and tower meta analysis hook into palantir’s tracking modules. This is the answer someone who like ricing their machines gives you, all it does is provide an illusion of control and a feeling of being smart.
It's possible you could get away from this if you trust your hardware enough, no? Like with Pinephone and switching all the hard switches off. I just mean for certain time periods where you may need a device but don't want it pinging off anything.
No, meta analysis is done off connections to upstream towers and connections to the cell network. The problem isn’t your device, but the fact the network itself is fully tapped. 4g also uses a symmetric cypher and doesn’t contain e2e communication so once you touch the tower all data is unencrypted within the carrier network. You have problems tracking off Bluetooth, WiFi and the carrier connections and with the carrier connections you have a blob of source code which isn’t controlled by the operating system and is communicated through via an abstraction layer to another device on the carrier side that logs all low layer communication and all high layer communication. Deviations from standard use that the majority of the population performs are also checked as unusual as we learned from the Snowden leaks about people who turn their phones off, so if you and your friend both turn your phones off at the same time for a secret communication it’s listed as an event and can be back correlated if/when you become a person of interest.
Our saving grace is the people using these advanced systems are idiots.
I'm still misunderstanding something. If I effectively make my phone a brick, remove the battery and everything, how is it still touching towers?
The absence of touching a tower is in itself an action and when compared to population averages stands out like a huge red flag that this person is performing suspicious activity.
Gotchya, thanks for your patience
The OP is looking for an introduction to free software, so I provided recommendations for what I would give someone looking for that. I wouldn't deride that as being an "illusion of control" or a feeling of "being smart" because of things the user cannot control. The same reason I wouldn't deride a user looking to use Ubuntu or Mint as their first Linux distro. You have to start somewhere, might as well learn in a friendly environment.
To answer your statement though on baseband monitoring, you're right, there's no way to avoid monitoring from the carrier or a third party with a stingray, short of using a phone without a modem in it to connect to a cell tower. No phone on the market has an open source modem either so you can only guess what it's doing since it's all proprietary code. Neither of these reasons would be a reason I would tell OP or any new person to privacy or security to prevent them from learning how to customize their phone or take their privacy back.
OP is looking for a phone focuses on privacy without specifying the target of who they are hiding from. If it’s just commercial entities, an iPhone is the correct choice, if it’s government then things become complicated, if they just want to learn how a phone works then lineage is fine and if they want to figure out how the cell network works they should be using osmoconbb. Their goal is nebulous, they never specified they wanted free software and the answer provided only provides an illusion of privacy and control.
Not specifying the target or not providing a threat model is something a beginner does. I'm trying to help build a bridge, to help the OP bring her power back as she mentioned in the post, and not deriding flawed but good enough options to get them them as "ricing" or acting like this answer is the end of the world because I didn't consider every single potential act of spying and privacy intrusions into my answer for a beginner.