You make an extremely valid point, though. What I would actually like (and what seems really hard to find) is a dumb phone with a 4G hotspot and which does not run Android in any way, shape or form.
Any suggestions
It runs KaiOS, which is a fork of Firefox OS IIRC. It's basically a dumb phone, but with some critical "smart" features like wifi hotspot, contacts/calendar sync, etc. It was a breath of fresh air for me.
Edit: Review link: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/aug/16/nokia-811...
https://support.kaiostech.com/support/solutions/articles/350...
Apart from the fact that it seems to be exactly what I'm looking for it's also reasonably cheap at ~90$.
Just, thank you!
That's for you to decide, I think. In terms of privacy, we decide what we're willing to give up. The usefulness of an Echo may be worth sometimes seeing ads for chicken soup to some. Some might even think of it as a feature!
If you don't want to know online advertisers to know when you're sick, you're going to be more mindful of just your cell phone and any nearby Echos. Don't have your friends tag you in posts on social media asking how you're doing (this one is completely out of your control), don't search for drug stores or which medicine you need to combat your symptoms, etc. I get the point is to limit your profile as much as possible, but this case seems unreasonably high on the effort to payoff ratio.
Does a smartphone make me a hypocrite?
To me, it does. Not to pick on you personally, but 99% of the people freaking out about the Echo own smartphones and carry them around all the time. For the convenience. It makes no sense, unless you realize that the person has just drawn their arbitrary convenience-privacy tradeoff line differently than the Echo owners have.
An Echo is just the tiniest subset of a smartphone but with some serious privacy risks, all of a very minuscule benefit in convenience. A gimmick most would probably say, the killer app to this day seems to be a kitchen timer. To compare that with a smartphone where tons of every day things can be quite inconvenient without one.
I get your point and on principle I agree. But the line most definitely isn't arbitrary set (even if you do find some practical use for an Echo). The difference is astronomical. That's not to say the current state of affair is depressing and we ought to really try to improve it.
If you say that the relatively low utility of an Echo means it’s not worth the potential downsides, that’s perfectly reasonable.
If you say that people who buy an Echo are insane for willingly putting a spy device in their house, that’s hypocritical and irrational if you have a smartphone.
I think there’s a useful discussion to have in the former case, but alas most of the conversation involves the latter.
Echo's only feature is listening and reporting. Its a different device in kind
If your phone has a spying feature, are you sure it can be turned off? How do you know?
Echo, like phones, uses low-power, always-on algorithms to listen for a specific phrase. Only when it hears that phrase does it actually start recording and sending your audio back home.
Are you worried about that low-power, always-on part listening to you? If so, then avoiding the Echo while carrying a phone with the feature switched off is sensible. But I don’t see why this would be worth worrying about, since the data stays local and isn’t saved.
If you’re worried about the device secretly recording you and sending that data to someone else, then the two are equivalent in their threats.
Further, despite being generally pretty locked down to the average consumer, smartphones are far less of a black box than the echo/home/etc.
Both are a concern, but technically skilled users are at least able to take steps to reduce the potential for their phones to spy on them. The only way to reduce any spying potential with the echo/home/etc, is not to have one at all.