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.