Ask HN: What is the best smartphone for privacy conscious consumers in 2018?

7 pointsenitihas2 comments

It seems for a normal consumer in the present day it is extremely difficult to evaluate phones on the privacy criteria. A lot of people suggest to simply buy from Apple. Having seen the recent posts on HN about OnePlus sending a lot of data home, there are a lot of reason to be skeptical. Which phones would you recommend to a privacy conscious audience and why?

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Do you want privacy conscious or “off the grid”?

For the former, Apple is the way to go; so far they haven’t done anything privacy-hostile and I personally trust them.

However, they do still have a lot of “cloud” services (including some that send data back unexpectedly, like all your email senders & call history even though there is no explicit toggle for it in the settings) so if you’re more for the latter then maybe an Android phone with good support from alternative operating systems (LineageOS with OpenGApps?) is a better option.

Apple if you want a out of the box, hassle free experience. Or if you are willing to be adventurous, grab a pixel and put lineageOS on it.

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