Privacy for me has been incredibly rewarding, but when talking to people who haven’t been introduced to privacy, there are occasionally some moments that make it exhausting. One conversation in particular is one that I’ve had to go through dozens of times, and it always goes along these lines:
- Alice: Why is your phone in airplane mode? / What’s your phone number?
- Bob: I don’t have a carrier.
- Alice: But you have a phone.
- Bob: Yes.
- Alice: How do you not have a carrier?
- Bob: Phones can come without a carrier.
- Alice: What do you use it for?
- Bob: Everything you use yours for.
- Alice: How do you talk to people?
- Bob: Messaging apps over Wi-Fi.
- Alice: What if you don’t have Wi-Fi?
- Bob: Public Wi-Fi is everywhere. If I don’t have Wi-Fi, I likely don’t need to get in touch.
- Alice: What about emergencies?
- Bob: I can still contact emergency services.
Each time it happens, it has a unique flavor. One person accused me of lying and then fraud. I know people are just curious and don’t mean to be rude, but it makes me die a little inside every time someone asks. I’ve begun trying to sidestep the conversation entirely:
- Alice: Why is your phone in airplane mode?
- Bob: To save battery.
or:
- Alice: What’s your phone number?
- Bob: You can contact me with an app called Signal.
People seem to think that a phone automatically comes with a carrier and that it’ll stop working if you don’t have one. In reality, I’m saving hundreds of dollars per year while avoiding spam, fraud, breaches, surveillance, and being chronically online. People have a hard time coping with those who do things a little differently.
Technology can be adapted to everyone’s unique workflow.
Yours is a highly specialised one, that apparently works for you. Something i may try for a day or two, but am confident can never adapt to my work flow. (Only know 2 “free” WiFi spots in my town. One wants an account. The other wants a phone number)
Playing devil’s advocate, I think it’s reasonable to have a load-up-minutes dumb phone, in case family dies or something and they don’t have access to the right app. That’s reasonable for close family to get upset about.
But you also don’t have to give that number out, heh.
I guess you could use Google Voice too, but that’s a bit… counterproductive unless you can sandbox the app.
I think it’s reasonable to have a load-up-minutes dumb phone
Those are becoming harder and harder to find. It’s hard to even find prepaid SIM cards. You now have to buy a voucher, create an account, and add it there, which activates the phone for the number of months the voucher is worth.
Public wi-fi is definitely not everywhere, but yeah, either you take joy in sharing the knowledge you have or you end up being a bit rude to prevent being asked.
That’s going to be highly dependent on where you live. In Tokyo I easily got around without service for years since there was wifi at every train station and convenience store
Not to be overly pedantic on the internet but something’s availability being ‘dependent on where’ is definitionally ‘not everywhere.’
I almost downloaded a phone thingy online to use for these silicon valley parasites, and like amazon, but on the security warnings I backed off.
What is the best way to securely get a phone number to use and keep, for free, online? Can one do that with signal? I thought you needed a working phone number for that?
This is the scene from Parks and Rec where Ron Swanson has to eventually concede to getting a flip phone.
hundreds of dollars per year? That’s how much a carrier is over there??
That’s how much a carrier is over there??
Yes. The “poverty” option is $15/month, but plans can easily go up to $100 or more per month. Out of curiosity, how much are they charging across the pond?
Yeah as a Dane, (different from dutch above) mobile’s usually between €8-15, we do have plans that go higher, but 4G 30GB per month I figure is pretty survivable unless it’s your only net (mine’s 10GB :P)
Damn what the hell. I’m Dutch and I pay less than €12 euros. For that I get 100 call minutes/messages and 6 GB. Neither of which I ever really get close to. Calling is mostly just in case of emergency or when we need to align something right now. And data is always useful because I definitely do not have free wifi anywhere. Do you never leave a big city or something? If I slip with my bike on an icy road and break something in the middle of nowhere it’s kinda good to have some way of communicating.
I’m on a popular discount carrier, and it’s ~$30/month. One of the big three carriers will easily charge $100/month.
Most people will try to find a family plan that lowers the cost per user but it comes with big caveats like long-ish term contracts and some nasty fine-print. And if your carrier gets bought out, which is happening a lot, you never know what changes might get force fed to you
I’m paying over $100 per month for 3 lines. 4th line is $6 a month from Tello
How much data do you have at that price ? I’m paying 19€/month for 4 lines, 3 at 5€/month with 30Gb and one at 4€/month for 25Gb
Damn that’s cheap. I pay $50/month per person, for unlimited
The sad truth is: you can’t talk about online privacy with normal people, they just won’t understand, if you try to explain it, they don’t care, simple as that! They’ll ignore anything you say and probably call you paranoid.
Totally wrong, skill issue.
I generally keep my privacy habits to myself, but if someone asks I will tell them. It’s always better to try with a chance of getting them interested than not to try at all.
If you are an old programmer/geek young people will dismiss you even though they don’t even know what a folder is. They think they are IT experts because they can apply the latest instagram filters to their photos.
even though they don’t even know what a folder is
Someone once tried sharing a file with me by copy pasting the file path as if it were a URL
Jup. I made that conclusion too.
However one time two friends asked me about secure messengers and I reluctantly gave up that I used Signal. Since then everyone in my closer friend circle suddenly had Signal.
I have shared and exposed my close friends to it and they use signal with me
Hello, wife?
I’m someone who likes to walk the path less traveled in general. And in general I’ve found that people don’t respond well to such things. Especially when you explain them in dept. “Oh they choose to be different huh? => let’s ridicule them to cover up our own insecurities”
I’ve learned through trial, error and ridicule that people need to earn the right to an explanation to these matters.
I’m not gonna explain to Joe Shmoe that I use Linux because I’m doing my part in not giving the uprise in fascism the steady flow of data they want to increase their influence over the world.
They’d never understand. They gotta earn that by proving they care about the topic.
Yeah something like “Nun of yer business.” works well.
Never explain yourself to people who don’t want to hear the explanation.
For nicer people something like “Its probably boring to you.” can work well. If they insist they can’t complain. :D
Try not having a phone at all. Those conversations are fun
How are you even alive?!
Edit:
Just keep in mind that the purpose of Airplane Mode is to prevent transmission. Your phone might still be receiving signals like GPS and WiFi SSIDs, which it can record to be transmitted later.
If you really don’t want to be tracked, leave it home.
At least by turning on airplane mode they cannot track your location.
Or own your device with a custom rom.
So… I’m kind of in the same situation but mine is actually by mistake. Namely my SIM somehow (OK maybe I tinkered with eSIM a bit much… anyway) works for data and SMS but not for calls. I tried to fix it a bit… then honestly I like it without. Most of the calls I received are not important, nor urgent, and the few that are can leave a message or an SMS.
I stopped relying on my phone for calls entirely and I like it.
When I tell people it doesn’t work they just shrug it off and always find a way to contact me without making a big deal out of it.
I still like having a SIM though if only to
- check where I am on a path the first time I get there
- know if the person I’m meeting might be late
- warn if I’m late on the way to somewhere
but typically my phone works well entirely offline (e.g. I do not stream music, I have actual files on my phone) so I understand.
Honestly in your shoes I’d gauge the person, if they are potentially interesting enough to explore the topic with curiosity, I’d be honest. If I just want to move on because they seem obtuse I’d keep it to the minimum.
I achieve the same by disabling VoLTE and VoWiFi and setting the phone to LTE only in
*#*#4636#*#*.I love these service menus.
*#*#3646633#*#*has so much stuff to permanently screw up on some MediaTeks. But also some useful ones like selection of frequency bands, or even specific frequency and cell id.
But yeah, some settings can persist factory reset, and some may even be illegal like Tx tests (verified that it does transmit garbage on selected frequency with SDR) or IMEI change. Not all settings are on all devices, and they may even be partially broken.But yeah, these settings are don’t touch it for the most part (some are just huge lists of undocumented variables). Some don’t even seem to be resettable from the menu, I mean menus where you select one option, but by default they are unset. And the band mode selection on Moto G54 5G was… interesting. Rather than a nice selection menu, you can type in a number and select to add or remove it from a vector variable for 4G and 5G. Of course, nowhere does it list valid options or give a reset button.
And lastly a thing that serves me as a warning for future, when I was playing around with a leaked service program for some Realtek Ethernet adapter, I found out what eFuse memory is. There is no going back.
If you didn’t yet might want to play with Precursor
that first number singlehandedly helped me fix my mom’s phone. for context, 5g reception is quite mediocre where i live (especially if you’re on att, which my mom thankfully isn’t on). i went to network settings: no band toggle. i opened android’s advanced network settings menu: tried to gaslight me that this phone doesn’t have 4g (i know damn well it does). finally, that first number in your comment that opens
HiddenMenu, showed an entry called “NR debug” or something like that. and there it was: “Disable NR”. her phone is so much faster now, but idk how long that will persist since some phones change this shit behind your back after like a week.rant
to all the carriers and phone manufacturers: JUST GIVES US THE BUTTONS AND KNOBS. WE KNOW WHAT WE ARE DOING AND FORCING US ON YOUR INFERIOR NETWORK IS NOT GOING TO CONVINCE US IT’S BETTER. 5G/NR IS JUST FUNDAMENTALLY A BAD IDEA TO USE FOR CELLULAR TELEPHONY. i miss the days of lte for internet, gsm/cdma for calls, like it was in 2019 and earlier. modern phones and vintage phones worked alike, and volte was merely an optional enhancement.
5G is fine when comparing with 4G. Just a step up. My issue with them is rather whatever is going on with VoLTE and VoNR. 2G/3G just worked for phone calls, but now you only get that guaranteed by purchasing a phone directly from the carrier. Hell, some carriers even blacklist or whitelist devices just because.
And in Australia phones are now getting blocked completely, even if they worked with VoLTE because the carrier decided they didn’t.. Hugh Jeffrey also made a video about that.
How are you using Signal without a phone number? - asking cause I genuinely would love to do so!
You can sign up using a VoIP number or a burner phone.
So it’s still yes, you do have to have a phone number.
So then you still need to give them a phone number to get texted on signal?
Signal requires a phone number to register, but I can hand out my username without giving them the phone number I registered with.
You might want to look into Matrix.
It doesn’t require any of that bullshit.
if the number you registered with eventually gets recycled to someone who then uses it for Signal, will that affect your account?
If that person registers with Signal then this guy loses his account and username. All new messages sent to his username will get sent to the new person’s phone but the new person won’t have any of the history.
Not if you change this setting.
My work around was keeping the phone number but not on my phone so I never lose it like that.
Specifically I ported it to Google voice where its just parked with no monthly cost (there was a 1 time port cost). I’m not logged in to voice ever so the anti-privacy of google doesn’t apply. Any text messages I receive get forwarded to a non google email (but thats few and far between).
I’m sure there are other similar options out there, but I did what I knew and its been fine.
I can’t fathom that Signal is not a honeypot.
Back when I tried to register, not only did they want a phone number (which usually links to IRL KYC stuff) but they also wanted me to complete a google captcha that took different metrics (canvas, etc) of my device.
Why is that needed? They say it’s to reduce spam, I just don’t believe it it.
Not only that, I can’t register using a linux system. I simply MUST register with a mobile device (that I will likely have on me) that can potentially track me through the cellular modem in the device and also likely has listening devices inside the device and a camera attached that is very hard to cover (because it’s embedded into the glass and and covering it with anything messes with the swipe up function).
No organization would create something that is so incredibly hostile to people who don’t want mobile phones and don’t want numbers unless they were a honeypot. I even think that Signal was created in a large part to try to siphon popularity away from XMPP before it could reach mass adoption.
Signal is not for people who categorically do not want numbers or mobile phones. They’ve never said that.
I think it is not required anymore
No, you still need a phone number. IIRC it’s on the roadmap, but not a priority.
It’s a honeypot, so of course making it so anyone can use it, even without a phone number, even with a mobile device, is not a priority.
if it’s a honeypot, why would you make it easier to use anonymously?
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My GrapheneOS phone is in airplane mode with cellular disabled and WiFi on.
If you explain yourself, people take that as meaning it’s up for debate. Better to say “I like it that way”.
I considered swapping to a flip-phone but stopped because I need to be able to access my banking app when near ATM’s. My card only ever has the bare minimum amount of money on it so that theft isn’t a concern.
If you explain yourself, people take that as meaning it’s up for debate.
Whenever you run into those people, I think it’s best to just tell them to fuck off. Maybe word it a bit more diplomatically, but still get the meaning across that it’s not a debate
It’s essentially cognitive dissonance. People are introduced to a life so different from their own that they attack it like an overactive immune system. They see it like a problem that needs fixed, rather than a lifestyle to learn about. It doesn’t help with how much people are conditioned to criminalize privacy, either.
Privacy but using public WiFi?..
My devices distrust any network, and I always use a VPN. It’s obviously not my first choice, but it can still be done safe enough.
If the wifi has firewall blocking non web ports, do you have a solution for those cases?
Mullvad VPN and others have “obfuscation” methods to mask your traffic as regular web traffic. If those don’t work, I can always connect to a proxy or Tor as a plan B, or see if any other Wi-Fi networks are available. I’ve never had this be an issue, but there are certainly options available.
I don’t have mullvadvpn but I use a different vpn that has obfuscation and I have tried every single setting within it but somehow some networks can still detect the vpn no matter what I try. I am not sure how they can do this.
The threat of public wifi isn’t as big of a deal as it used to be. Before widespread VPNs and when internet traffic was unencrypted, anything you transmitted could be read by someone else on the network. But nowadays all an eavesdropper would see is what websites you’re connecting to (without a VPN) or the VPN if you are using one. Happy to be corrected if I’m mistaken though
