Do you really not have prepaid sim cards in the US? that you buy with 5 bucks and it lasts one year, and then you just top it up for another 5? Those carriers are really milking you good over there.

Just dont stop at starbucks one morning and send those 5 bucks to Signal. One coffee a year will make a difference. I have my rocket emoji already.

Nimarata Randhawa, using a pseudonym Nikky Haley wants people to use their real names? interesting..

Its a dumb phone, you insert a sim card and thats it. The telco will know where you are based on the sim connection to towers (as with any other phones) and all calls and texts are stored, but other than than you dont have to worry about anything else. I suppose you dont have to login to some account to make it work therefore even if it harvests any data, it does not know who it belongs to (no add ID) so not saleable. Its pretty easy, no real identity (through email, account, etc) attached to it = private.

They push out the competition, apps that you install from collecting all the data they can. Harvesting data is becoming more centralized.

I recently bought a ticket. I check flights through 3rd party (kiwi) but always buy directly (dont feel like uploading my ID to some website) and it did not ask for anything. I think this is the way they fight the resellers? They check your identity before boarding so what is the point?

NetGuard is a good app to block internet access to apps you dont want connected to the web.

Is that bad? I am trying out Organic maps now, but was usong Magic Earth before.

The thing is that today you dont even need access to the coversation when you have metadata. Imagine, a woman calls a number of center for planned parenthood, is on the phone for 20 mins. Then she calls a number of her gyno doc for couple mins. Then her phone is located at that gyno doc a week later for 2 hours or whatever it takes. Do you need to decrypt the conversation? You already know what was discussed.

Nothing from Meta, Google, Microsoft is good. It might be encrypted, but the apps suck everyrhing they can from your device and connect it to your real identity you have on FB, IG, Gmail emails...

True you can turn off using Add ID for personalization on iPhone.

Its most probably not that X has access to your phone. I believe since some older version of android, all apps are sandboxed and there are rules to what they have access to (Android Run Time, SELinux). How this works IMHO is you are using a normie (google) android phone. You have an advertising ID assigned to it (you can find it in the setting under Privacy/Marketing), which is visible to apps, therefore the Feeder app sees it and sells the data of what you are looking at tied to the ID, someone buying it for a campaign on an exchange and uses it for marketing on X, which shows it to you based on that same advertising ID because it can see it also. To avoid 95% of tracking like this, use a degoogled android phone. In case you use iPhone, there is nothing you can do.