Phones, the device we all know and love, used to get knowledge and entertainment alike. But did you know it actually sucks? Phones are little tracking devices made by the Devil- I mean, Big Tech™ made to send all of your data, to feds. They're small rectangles of evil that send off your exact location via 5G, have the same shit as Intel ME (usually on SnapDragon and Apple phones), use unauditable non-free libraries, blobs and firmware, such as the bootloader and modem. The primary strategy to not being tracked when you have a modern smartphone, is to sniff your own nutsack.
I wish. Turns out; boomers are right. The best smartphone is an extremely old one, or none at all.
Yup, it's real. Baseband/modems (Qualcomm/others) runs proprietary code with direct DMA access to memory, often no isolation from main CPU.[1]
Phones are never truly "off", as the proprietary code in the modem/baseband is always on, because of "security", which is obviously a thinly veiled lie.[2]
Every iPhone after the iPhone 11 pings Apple's servers for Find My Device, even when the battery is dead. This means tht if a third-party could interfere with the signal, it could, very well, be used to spy on you.[3]
First off, let's start with the news almost everybody knows: Google wants to lock down Android, and that's a well known fact. but, even though AOSP is, well, open-source, it has: non-free drivers, non-free bootloader and a non-free modem. And currently, there is no device that is 100% open-source, because modern phones aren't like computers which can just function without some drivers; phones need all drivers or else they don't work at all.
GNU/Linux phones are getting closer and closer to being fully free as in freedom, so let's give them a spotlight:
PINE64's PinePhone is a GNU/Linux phone known for having a wide range of mobile GNU/Linux distributions such as Mobian, Manjaro, postmarketOS, etc. It is one of the most promising phones for the ultimate libre phone, as Replicant, a fully libre Android ROM is working on supporting it.
Not as promising, but extremely secure, and runs a GNU/Linux distro called PureOS, which (when used on computers) is Free Software Foundation approved, meaning it's 100% free as in freedom, however, to minimize problems, PureOS on the Librem 5 is not 100% libre.