Give me the use case? Keep in mind, turning off wifi for the entire device but leaving cellular one defeats the purpose.
There are legitimate use cases for disabling all communications to reduce particular threats. There really arn’t any that apply to a phone for just disabling wifi or cellular. Let me know if you know of any.
This wouldn’t happen. Its not that the wireless communication is the risk, its that you and the phone are the risk. Phones are turned off and left at the door, no exceptions. So in this case this phone will not be any different.
There are some legitimate use cases for the hardware switches for the camera and microphones. These can have some use if your bringing your phone into partially sensitive environments, more specifically if you may be a higher profile target.
But for separate WiFi and cellular switches… I’m sorry, but no one has posted any legitimate use case for this. In what scenario would you disable WiFi on your entire phone but not cellular?
There are one or two fairly out there scenarios maybe that could fit, but they fall over because the scenarios would result in simply turning off your phone or not having it on you.
edit: if the company doesn’t have threats that these features would protect against then the only reason they included them is to look more secure.
Perhaps but in this situation you would never know, so wouldn’t know to disable anything.
I’ve come up with i think one possible use case.
The phone will potentially also have the ability to act as a docked computer. In this case you may have some need or case to disable cellular while on a network that have restrictions on being connected to other networks. Both wifi and cellular being on would mean there is an internet facing devices that’s not the networks internet facing equipment, giving attackers potentially a way into the network.
There’s some legitimate use here, but i kind of have a hard time justifying it. With byod type networks this generally isnt considered an issue, if the phones compromised it usually doesn’t matter anymore. And if your network was sensitive enough to have a control like that i would find it hard to believe anyone would let a mobile connect to it in the first place, in fact it probably wouldn’t even have wifi.
There is maybe something there. But it is a bit of a stretch.
Funny enough i see better use cases for a switch that disabled all wireless communications, but not separate ones, i just cant find something that fits for that.
I don’t know about you but i actually turn off (software switch lol) my network manager in Linux when i connect my phone to copy files so as to not create a new automatic network connection… yes, it’s tinfoil but meh it takes two seconds.
If you don’t like Google and apple knowing everything about you, there hasn’t been a phone to suite your needs for a while.
With the face time glitch that should never have happened allowing for users to listen to other users without notification, I’m happy there is a alternative.
If we could get a degoogled android phone, that would be great, however many phones without Facebook use embedded apis to track users anyway from their installed apps. So at the moment, it’s pick the lesser of two evils or don’t have a smart phone
This is getting harder to achieve in todays society. You could save $600 on buying a librem and just buy a burner phone for those times you want privacy and use the smart phone for all other times…
IRT Usecase, could one be not wanting FB, google etc to derive suggestions from a certain path you walked one day? This vid that was on the forum before:
Turning things off, but they are passively still listening. A physical switch that “breaks” the hardware so that various apps cannot still do passive scanning, indexing, caching etc to then upload later when services are restored- then FB and various other apps know where you have been and it alters their profile on you.
@Eden, legit use-case? I know you are bringing up how this can be done securely via software because of the Linux nature of this phone, but maybe just the ‘warm-fuzzy’ factor makes it somewhat legit.
Any app, whether it’s waze, a game or anything on the play store, even if installed through fdroid, is 99% likely to have Google apis in its code, designed for integration with services such as firebase and other Google services. Not to mention any app that offers Facebook integration has the same issue.
It does not matter if you don’t have a Google app on your phone. Code, designed for Google services is embedded in the vast majority of apps on the market. If you have any closer source application on your phone, the chances are it has Google or Facebook integration. There is Google and Facebook code running on your device. The only way to get around this is to audit every open source app you install and never touch closed source apps.
Google is integrated into practically every app on your phone, even without the dedicated apps, and they’re is very little you can do about it.
Source : Software engineer with a history of developing and reverse engineering existing apps.
I don’t know what waze is, I don’t have any games on my phone. I install almost exclusively open source software through fdroid, only exceptions are spotify and threema.
If those are tracking me (and please clarify what exactly YOU mean by that), then please explain because I honestly would love to know about it.
Google most definitely does the same thing. Spotify offers Facebook and Google login. For that feature, Spotify will have to initialise the apis required for that feature. In the process of initialising those api’s, the application will contact Google and Facebook and provide at least some basic information on the device. How much they provide, you don’t know. Especially with Facebook as it’s closed source and the data is encrypted.
That is interesting and I will have to think about my spotify account. Thank you.
I still stand by my statement that it is absolutely possible to have a phone running LineageOS (which is android) that does not communicate with either of those companies. At least not in a meaningful way. I mean, if by tracking you mean any information at all, then you simply can’t have a phone or anything that can connect to anything … ever.
Regardless of OS.
The thing that I was saying is that a large proportion of apps, even open source apps have some form of Google integration. If the app is compiled in a compiler provided by Google, Google will have something integrated with the app. How fdroid compiles idk. But I’m willing to bet, some of your open source apps still have Google apis implemented. But that requires sitting down for a day and going through every dependency and connection made by the app, for each app.
This will apply to the Librem for sure- be it zombie cookies or some such thing, people might get a false sense of security with this phone but simply using a web browser could start a process of tracking and even identification.
As someone who has a brick phone, I have to disagree.
Given, I am not a business men who has to keep all leads open all the time, but it works just fine to be offline while on the move.
