Even “Dumb” Phones Are Compromised

Think buying a flip phone will keep you private? Think again.

If you’re worried about your smartphone spying on you you’ve probably considered buying a “dumb” phone at one point. These are the type of phones that were common before smartphones caught on. They don’t run Android or iOS but this doesn’t mean they don’t have an operating system. They do, it’s just much more limited in scope. With these phones you’re usually limited to the apps that come preinstalled on the phone. If there are additional apps available for download it’s a very small amount. These type of phones are marketed towards people who want to get away from constant social media distractions and as simple phones for the elderly to use.

You might think of Nokia when you think of “dumb” phones. Nokia phones were once very popular in the US and believe it or not they still dominate the “dumb” phone market, coming in with the 2nd highest market share behind iTEL. Unfortunately modern Nokia “dumb” phones come with Google and Facebook apps preinstalled without a built in way to remove them. Additionally many of these phones run KaiOS which is partnered with Google and Facebook. This not only defeats the purpose of owning one for privacy reasons, but it also defeats the purpose of owning one to get away from social media. The same goes for pretty much all remaining brands of “dumb” phones I could find.

Eventually I did find one without any of that built in, the Light Phone II. It’s almost perfect except for the fact that the operating system LightOS, is proprietary. Because nobody but those in the company can see the source code, and because no efforts have been made to reverse engineer it, we don’t know for sure if there is any sort of data collection going on. Additionally even they say they are exploring adding big tech apps to the phone in the future because their userbase has been requesting such apps, probably because living without any smart functionality at all means you’re essentially cut off from the modern world.

Well what if you don’t care about being cut off from the world and just want privacy? Can’t you just buy a really old phone? Unfortunately no, these phones are often 2G phones. While 2G infrastructure will remain for emergency use cases for quite some time many service providers are currently shutting down their 2G and 3G services. The ones that haven’t will do so within a few years.

Going back to Nokia phones and KaiOS for a second, there was a hack back in 2017 for the Nokia 8110 4G “dumb” phone that allowed developers to play around with it. Eventually one called GerdaOS came out that appears to make the phone truly private. In our efforts to bring private devices to the masses we have looked into reselling this device with GerdaOS preinstalled but not only is the device old now, but it also might make it easier to track you because it makes you stand out.

What I mean by this is that when you use a cell phone you can and will have your location tracked by the service provider through triangulation. This means if your country has laws allowing the government to obtain information from tech companies, like the US has, the government in turn also knows your location. In addition to your location they also know what kind of phone it is thanks to the device’s IMEI. Depending on how you purchased the phone and phone service they may not know that it is you that owns the phone but the reality is that a dumb phone is much more likely to stand out to them on a map because it isn’t blending in with the huge market share of Android and iOS devices. We haven’t completely ruled out selling privacy dumb phones in future for those that wish to go that route but Degoogled Android phones remain the best option for privacy. This is great news for anyone that doesn’t wish to be completely disconnected from modern society.