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Why not get another "unsafe" phone?


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Here is an idea: if security matters to you, get a better phone. They sell them in shops.

Why not make a phone which is secure by default?

it's (vaguely, remotely) possible that some new phone released yesterday is dangerous,

That's no greater a possibility than for my netbook, or my wristwatch, for that matter. Why pick on phones over other electronics?

(I suppose the answer is to see your previous paragraph regarding rationality)


Better have a bricked phone but secured phone? That is basically your argument?

Security is used to euthanize perfectly working systems and harass users for money. Security has become dangerous for the user in that aspect.


I wonder if other brands have received the same scrutiny. I suspect not. In which case probably a lot of mobile phones are not safe. The only saving grace is that we don't hold them up to our heads to use them as telephones much any more.

We all have had, but in the past. it isn't feasible now.

I mean, you can buy "safe" smartphone, but first you can't prove beyond reasonable doubt that it is actually safe and private, and second, you attract more attention because the same phones are being bough by the criminals.


The safest phone, is no phone ...

Which 10 year old phone is more safe / secure?

Is there a safer alternative phone/os that can’t be broken into by Cellebrite?

the whole point was to evade 0days lol

so then what phone is truly safe here?


First, dumb phones are still a thing and second, safe from what?

Burner phones are probably even more vulnerable.

Not for "security" but rather for surveillance. The problem is the phones are too secure for governments to get the surveillance they want out of them.

It's cheaper to buy a burner than to throw away your expensive phone after it's been potentially compromised.

This sort of overemphasized paranoia about security is something which makes me, I dunno, irritated. If you decide to go to extreme, everything is unsafe but you don't want an old device even as a secondary device?

I'd rather work on my paranoia than on getting a fully secured device.

By the way, I am writing this on a mobile with 2 GB RAM and running Android 9 as my other mobile got broken.


I can't imagine that anyone worldwide was going to buy their first and only smartphone, but decided to spend more to get a special high-security black phone, and is then without a phone because of this. And even if they were, I'd rate the safety of even one user who'd accidentally click through the warnings and make a call that should have been secure but wasn't, as paramount.

If my smoke/heat/etc detector starts to fails I don't want it silently dropping back to a smoke-only detector. I want it to start beeping loudly and refuse to stop.

> If the user is informed they have a non genuine device that is not safe or secure

Having to flash a new OS onto it is an appropriately sized clickthrough for a warning of that magnitude. Like being woken in the night to change a smoke-detector battery.


My concern is that the phone could be compromised. Having a phone hacked would be bad enough without giving the attacker the option to easily hospitalize/kill you.

Why not get another device? Third party app stores break the security model for regular users.

Smartphones have seen explosive growth because normal people can use them safely.


Right and that's the issue... why is this needed in the first place? There's no additional security, it just prevents DIY types from repairing their own phone, as they don't want to buy a $500 tool.
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