Since Snowden I use my phone in minimalistic way. Phone calls. Minimal texting. No games. Banking apps if necessary.
Treat your phones as an enemy. Use real computers with VPN and software like Little Snitch when online. Use cameras for photography and video.
The benefits of this approach are immense. I have long attention span. I don't have fear of missing out.
If governments wan't the future to be painted by tracing and surveillance mediated towards people trough big tech - lets make it mandatory by law. And since big tech will reap benefits from the big data they must provide phones for free.
:)
>Treat your phones as an enemy. Use real computers with VPN and software like Little Snitch when online.
I'm assuming your "real computer" is a mac (since little snitch is mac only). What makes you think apple won't do the same for macos? Also, while you have greater control with a "real computer", you also have less privacy from the apps themselves, since they're unsandboxed and have full access to your system.
I get that, but on the other hand if someone says "if you care about privacy, you should use an e2e messenger like whatsapp", then I'll have serious doubts about whether you're actually knowledgeable or just spouting buzzwords.
Your advice might be sound with the proper operating system choice, but the fact that you made such a glaring error in your initial comment makes it hard to take you seriously. It also brings into question whether you actually have a good understanding of privacy/security, or are just LARPing.
Error? Seriously? Did you make a wrong assumption that I care? About karma?
I share my experience and my point of view. Nothing more, nothing less. And the most important point is not technical.
The most important point is personal habits. To overcome smartphone addiction. We put our lives, thoughts and photos on closed technology and have false expectations that someone will care for our security or wellbeing.
Yes, I am a dumb person obviously. Thanks for your invaluable input. Dude.
But my use case is not to hide or remove digital exhaust.
Creating habit of limited usage is more important and realistic. Funny part is that as a side-effect I don't cary my smartphone around so much. I have separate GPS system in my cars and dumb phone for emergency.
If you're treating your phone as hostile why would you skip gaming apps but use banking ones? That seems backwards if you're assuming your mobile is the weak point.
In the EU the PSD2 directive obliged banks to provide strong authentication for customers login process and various operations on the account incl. payments ofc. Most of the time mobile applications are being used in the result - for either login confirm or as software OTP generators (biometric verification is also supported); the lists of printed codes are rather obsolete now and some banks may actually charge your extra for sending you text messages with such codes. I know there are hardware security tokens but in all these years I haven't seen anyone using such here.
So, it's rather hard to avoid banking apps.
Also, the PSD2 directive implements the duty of providing API infrastructure for third-parties. [1]
There still exist banks that provide you with an RSA token. If a bank does not give you the option, how can one (sorry) "of the right segment" have business with it? You look at the service provider, you see all kinds of bad signals, you hire it anyway: this is a big part of what is destroying us!
Restraining myself to write something very strong about phone security and general user expectancy and duly expectancy (low) - let us stress again the legal side: how do you prove to a bank that, in case of theft from the account, your device was safe? People who see their money stolen then have controversies with the bank about responsibility.
BTW: PSD2 has been, in many parts, a huge nightmare. Furthermore, healthy parts of it for some reason have not been implemented.
I don't agree with some (most?) of the parent posters comments in this threa.
But I feel there's a valid argument to be made that if your adversary is the sort of people who'd be feeding Apple image hashes to find people, you're probably be wise to carry a regular phone on which you do boring norm-core sorts of things.
A phone you use to take pictures of cats and pay your rent using banking apps and call your parents - while not using it to communicate with your dealer or your anarchist collective or your friendly investigative journalist.
Sorry, I misunderstand your question. I just don't like mobile games, and mobile banking is acceptable use case for me at the moment. But pc banking is obviously a better choice. The general idea of treating your phone as a problem has deep personal benefits. It started for me with realization (years ago) that I am an addict for "dopamine" hits and this "thing" in my pocket has direct influence on my mental performance.
>It started for me with realization (years ago) that I am an addict for "dopamine" hits and this "thing" in my pocket has direct influence on my mental performance.
Sounds like this is more about "checking your phone less", than "improving security/privacy". This is evident elsewhere in your advice. eg. "phones as an enemy", but no advice about killswitches for microphone? Or some sort of mitigation against GPS/mobile networking tracking?
Treat your phones as an enemy. Use real computers with VPN and software like Little Snitch when online. Use cameras for photography and video.
The benefits of this approach are immense. I have long attention span. I don't have fear of missing out.
If governments wan't the future to be painted by tracing and surveillance mediated towards people trough big tech - lets make it mandatory by law. And since big tech will reap benefits from the big data they must provide phones for free. :)