Octocontrabass wrote:
Schol-R-LEA wrote:
T-Mobile
Their offer to let you bring your own phone is quite prominent. The "no support" disclaimer just means they won't be able to help you if your phone isn't compatible.
Ah, perhaps I need to speak to that one rep's manager, then. It probably isn't worth the trouble, though. Especially since I was specifically discussing 4G-enabled devices aside from phones, which may actually be off the table (or might simply have thrown him off).
Getting back to the topic at hand, I also asked about other mobile OSes, and they seemed to be confused - they didn't think it was possible to put an OS other than Android on an LG phone (which may be true for that brand, for all I know, but AFAICT it should be possible). The idea of a mobile-enabled device other than a phone or a tablet definitely didn't seem to be familiar to them.
More to the point, not using an established mobile OS such as Android or iOS isn't realistic for most people, not because of the issue of flashing the phone or the OS itself, but because people don't use Android - they use Android apps. It is the application ecosystem that matters. As I said when the topic of the Huawei ban came up, the real issue for any new mobile OS is getting all the companies such as Amazon, Walmart, and Bank of America on-board with system-specific versions of their mobile apps - while they all have decent mobile webapp support, few casual users would find using the web browser for shopping and banking acceptable.
Now, in this context, that's probably a good thing, since they are every bit as aggressive as Google in their data strip-mining, and having more control over that would be a plus for anyone looking for that sort of anonymity.
While I still think that any attempt at such is a fool's errand - there simply are far too many forms of sigintel which are being applied by these companies and governments for you to escape all or even most of it - avoiding the mobile apps is a better place to start, since that's at least something you can control (and you can use anonymizers for the web connections, which you ordinarily can't with the mobile apps since that would defeat the purpose of them, both from the purchaser's perspective, and the provider's).
So I repeat: no computer or data link which is actually operational is secure. Period. Mitigation is a possibility, but not actual security.