A smartphone by its nature is a surveillance device no matter what operating system is on it. As long as the cellular radio is on and you are connecting to towers, your location is being tracked.
That's why Pinephone and Librem 5 have the killswitches.
You mean airplane mode? I think most phones can selectively turn off the cellular, wifi, and bluetooth radios.
No, I mean hardware killswitches.
https://puri.sm/posts/lockdown-mode-on-the-librem-5-beyond-h...
https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/PinePhone#Killswitch_confi...
All phones have hardware killswitches. It's called a dead battery.
How can you tell if the battery is dead in a phone that you don’t control? Take a heat gun to it to melt the glue, disassemble, and test the battery with a multimeter?
Re:Pine64 September update
by necrotic_comp on Wednesday September 16, 2020 @11:54AM
(#24493852)
Or even just writing shell scripts. Writing a whole android application for what would be a 10 line python script is a pain that I don't even want to think about.
I wouldn't call what smartphones do "spying". But if you're already at a place where you consider these devices adversaries, then sure, cutting off your nose to spite your face is the right move.
Sure, but 50% of what a smartphone does are anti-features anyhow. Maybe having to drop to CLI a few times a day is better than being spied on, for some people.