Smartphone Avoidance

I assume that many lainons, like me, forgo cellphone ownership for privacy reasons. How do you deal with situations where they are mandatory, or nearly so? I've been lucky enough to not need to job- or apartment- hunt for the past couple of years, but I know that the absence of a phone number requires an explanation at best, and is an immediate refusal at worst. Many employers assume they have constant contact with you, and will be upset if you stand in the way of on-the-fly shift adjustments, or the adoption of some workplace app. As cellphones become even more widely adopted, the number of useful/essential services that assume you have one will only grow. Do you consider burners worth the cost?(I do, personally). Do you have VoIP services you consider trustworthy? Have a landline? Share whatever tips/stories you have.

I've a dumbphone which I use occasionally. Usually I miss the on-the-fly shift adjustments and either come too early or too late (which has happened 5 or 6 times in total). I've a coworker which I sometimes call (from somebody else's phone) the day before to make sure if there aren't shift changes. I've only received a couple of comments for owning a dumbphone and one which was positive which went something like "yeahh, it's probably the best to have a phone like that nowadays". The stupidest comments I've gotten regarding my phone was when 2 guys from work tried to joke about how I'm using it to view facebook and then they asked me if I had a facebook account at all. To which I replied with "no", if they pushed a bit more I could've went full sperg and told them that facebook is a botnet (I've done this a couple of times with other coworkers even if they weren't pestering me. I can't stand when I see someone use their androidshit and open up discord/reddit whilst talking to me). I suspect that they wanted to ask me if I had internet at home which is even more disheartening when nontech people think facebook is synonymous with internet. Somewhat recently a new law has passed where you have to register your SIM card where you have to give your provider your name/lastname address and all that personal jazz. I knew that this was the case in the US but I had no clue something this horrible would hit Europe as well. I refuse to do so, so now I can't even call people from my phone, I can just receive phonecalls. I'll most likely ditch my dumbphone completely, I'll just setup an email server. I don't believe that I should jump hoops because of my employer nor that I should feel uncomfortable when I'm not on the clock, if they want to contact me they can shoot me an email or they can send me mail via post. I think that this is a rather good mentality to have, if they want to contact me they'll do so one way or another or they'll tell me in person if there's something urgent. I haven't been in a situation where I had to own a phone for work/apartment but there have been a couple of services which have asked me for my phone number, such services should be ignored at all costs.

I am still using a smart phone (without GAPPS and other easy to avoid botnet features) but I think that I can provide answer for your questions. I have been planning to quit for months but I haven't pulled the trigger yet. >Do you consider burners worth the cost?(I do, personally). Depends on threat model, I have used them in past but I don't feel like I need them right now. They are great when you have to make a call that you don't want to be associated with your real identity, assuming that you are using burner phones in a way that life cycle of one phone is measured in hours rather than days. >Do you have VoIP services you consider trustworthy? There is thousands providers on the market, at the end of the day only provider that I would trust is myself. >Have a landline? I don't use landline myself but I do consider it a great alternative to cell phone, if I would have a chance I would use it.

burners are expensive to maintain in the US. even fully pay-as-you-go generally require you make some kind of payment every month to keep the number active, and this payment isn't significantly cheaper than a budget contract carrier. as for privacy, there is a lot more legal gray area to get one without compromising your identity. every carrier will request that you dox yourself, but there isn't much to prevent you from lying to them unlike a contract carrier where bills need to be either mailed to you or debited from a valid bank account. both of these options entail a much more severe kind of fraud that is likely to result in police action rather than just having your account terminated. like >>17287 said burners make the most sense if you're actually going to burn it after doing your business. voip seems like the better option and its something i've been looking into. there seem to be various levels you can approach it at depending on how much of the hosting/configuration you want to do yourself. afaik at a minimum you have to get direct inward dials from someone, and that someone will probably ask for identification, but i'm sure there are some that won't. from what i've seen most DID services are really intended for business customers so their pricing scheme is usually built with large volumes in mind. for both of those reasons you're probably best off trying to find a private reseller on e.g. the lowendtalk forums. if any lainons have recommendations or practical experience buying DIDs I'd like to hear about it because this is all just from my own research and observations, i haven't done it myself. your other option is buying from a full-featured "voip provider" which usually means they give you a phone number and you can connect to their service with a SIP client (or some app they give you, but from what i've seen they're almost always using SIP behind the scenes and so you can typically use your own client if you dig through their support documentation). the difference between this and getting DIDs/hosting the pbx yourself is like the difference between using someone's email service vs. getting a domain name and pointing it at your own mail service, but the technical details are far more complicated since there's way more moving parts than with email and everything is set up for business customers instead of private individuals. the latter option, voip providers, seem to have more options for individuals and small businesses. there also seems to be more room for dedicated "privacy oriented" providers to carve out a niche. these are inevitably more expensive and it's hard to say if they're deserving of your trust. all of this being said, even using a voip provider that you give full and accurate dox to will likely be preferable to using a smart phone, if only because it lets you make and receive calls without carrier location tracking, which is a much more immediate concern for most people than getting a totally "off the books" phone number. after all, if you need a "phone number" that stands up to a court subpoena you'd really be better off just using an encrypted messaging service over IP.

>on-the-fly shift adjustments Don't be a prole, obviously. Get an education that will let you be free with your time schedule or start your own business.

burners are not worth it. i saw in another thread that it is better to buy SIM cards and let them sit for months before you use them on an aosb phone. i dunno if linux phone is the same, iwould assume so. anyway, both of those phones are free from wifi triangulation and other tracking bullcrap and data mining with the right apps. anyway, it is cheaper to buy stacks of sim cards and change phone numbers once a month or to categorise your sim cards. so you have a couple for work and the rest are there for when you switch at the end of the week or month. there are also bags which supposedly make it impossible for phone to track you on top of that but i dunno much about it either

>go in a shop to buy a service >ask the vendor some details about said service >"sir you have to use our app/internet" >"the fact is you are the vendor of the service I want to consume the service, I'm here right now and you are here to fulfill my needs of the service so please don't talk me soykaf about your soykafty app and answer my fuarrrking questions." Man I hate this globohomo apple consumerist sad disneyland that society has turned in.

I should mention I do have a phone though it's not logged into anything that I don't own and I've replaced the google core services framework with the non-botnet version. I run as much open source software on it as I can. >Do you consider burners worth the cost?(I do, personally). Yes I have two burners usually. >Do you have VoIP services you consider trustworthy? Yes I use a service called twillio. It's a sort of DIY programmable telephony platform and if you wanted to you could probably used it's SIP services to turn any suitable portable device into a nice wifi phone.

>>17262 >Many employers assume they have constant contact with you, and will be upset if you stand in the way of on-the-fly shift adjustments, or the adoption of some workplace app. Forgot to mention. You can install bluestacks on a PC and emulate an android phone.

>>19773 Exactly.

>>19773 You should rather tell him something he cares about " you are telling me that you are not needed and i can do everything online, are you really willing to argue against your own employment?"

>>19773 >>20330 >>20334 why argue with an insignificant salesman of this company. he can't do soykaf about how things are going in his company. he probably knows he's easily replaceable.

>>20335 Cause i managed to get what i want with it. Reminding them helping you is helping themselves works even if not always.