Suggestion: Librem 5 "Outgoing-Only" cellular connection mode

Hardware Librem 5
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I’ve been thinking recently about how invasive cell-phones are. Having a phone with an enabled cellular connection allows your carrier (and any entity powerful enough to strong arm them) to know your location. Given how often we carry our phones on us, and that most people try to always keep their phones well charged, our location is essentially perpetually recorded.

I would suggest that in addition to “airplane mode”, Purism add an “Outgoing-Only” mode to their phones’ cellular connection settings. This would essentially be an airplane mode that is automatically disabled when sending SMS or making calls. I would imagine that after a few minutes airplane mode would be re-enabled.

The most secure way to do this I’ve thought of is to mimic Windows’ UAC. “Are you sure you want to enable cellular connectivity? [no], [yes - for 15 minutes]”. To make sure that this isn’t as useless as webcam indicator lights that are controlled in userspace this toggle should be controlled at the driver/kernel level. That way rogue programs couldn’t break through the privacy measure unless granted permission by the kernel.

3 Likes
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While I like the idea here, how can we trust the software to do what we think its doing?

I believe that the Librem way of handling this use case is to switch the hardware kill switch on right before each call and then switch it right back off.

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The phone will have a hardware switch, but that does not prevent someone from modifying the software in a way to implement such a outgoing-only mode (creating an additional app for that would probably be the easiest way).

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True. But given that the hardware switch achieves this, I don’t think Purism will devote resources to developing a software solution to problem they solved in hardware.
However, I’m sure they would happily include such a mode developed by anybody with the time, resources, and know-how to develop such a mode.

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simple kill switch. remove the battery. good for you if you were smart enough to chose one with a user-serviceable battery. most flagships have carefully omited this “feature” to include a bigger battery or so they say.