Google voice isn’t available outside the usa, AFAIK. Besides, I would not want google to have access to even more than they already have access to…
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Now, that is a good example that allows me to imagine a bit more about the reason why people would need two phones in some cultures.
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It may be better now, but Google Voice wasn’t always the most reliable service in the past.
Good remark, but I think that phone designers actually want users to share as much as they can to their contacts. Their business model is about the users leaking as much info as possible about themselves and whom else are they more inclined to give personal info than to their friends and family? That is probably the reason they are blind to users who want to keep some info private.
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That would be very rude here.
Separate billing or more likely the second phone outright belongs to the company who gets a fleet of them from the carrier.
I don’t know how common this is, but most of the people that I know who have two phones just kept their old one when they got a new one. The old one may not have cell service anymore, but still can use wifi. So they mostly use one for games or such, and the other for communication. Because phones tend to have their internal space filled up by just a few bloated apps and many apps insist on being on built-in memory instead of an SD card, one phone isn’t enough (despite the fact that they have way more memory than computers a decade ago and that SD slot).
I can understand having two phones due to the fact that they are so leaky with private info. Sadly it would legitimately make sense to have one for family, one for work, one for friends, and one for new contacts. They’re really not well-designed when it comes to things like that.
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This sort of thing is an area of OS design which I dislike. Years ago I used to dream of the possibilities of fast, low-power, ubiquitous wearable Linux computers. And now that they are here, they are deliberately insecure and omit all of the good stuff.
Many of these problems of app access would be solved by simply creating another user account. Or being able to easily change permissions. Since Android is based upon GNU/Linux, and iOS upon BSD/Mach this should be the easiest thing. And it’s why I was tentatively optimistic that Ubuntu for phones might have been an improvement. This is not functionality they need to pay developers to include, it is functionality they were paid to remove.
I usually handle this problem by not using deliberately compromised social media services from deliberately compromised phones. But as the years go by, more people expect to be able to chat/text with me, so I will need to figure out something.
As for giving phone numbers in potentially sketchy situations, I use Gurgle Voice. If you use Android, Gurgle already knows your phone number anyway.
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After an … incident where someone who shouldn’t have had my personal number gave my personal number to someone who really really REALLY shouldn’t have had it, I did the same thing. Then work was like “OMG why do you not have a work cell phone? Let’s get you one.” I had to change my personal number for unrelated reasons which ended up saving me epic amounts of trouble later (the second person in the chain started harassing everyone who they’d gotten the cell phone number for). Now anyone who gets my personal number gets a lecture that ends with “If I wanted them to have my number they wouldn’t be asking you.”
Everyone I’ve given the lecture to seems to be pretty understanding about the whole deal.
Eh, maybe but I think that’s sensible. MDM to keep company data safe, separate phone to keep personal data personal. The companies have a legitimate reason for MDM and employees have a legitimate reason to keep their own data use and activity where their employers can’t get at it.
Complaints about carrying two devices … also sensible but I think should be lower priority than personal security and privacy concerns.
On the topic of having two personal phones, I don’t currently have a need for two. I wish we were at a better place with separate user profiles on mobile devices. I think that would alleviate some of the need (not for MDM and separate devices for work and personal) but it would still likely put people out of contact for one profile whenever they were using the other one.
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What can you do when all people you need to communicate with insist that you use a network which is, by design, insecure?
In some countries, the mobile phone carriers are legally required to know who their customer is to establish a contract. Here in Japan for instance, you can not buy a burner phone any more.
in any case @popobawa4u’s thought that “this should be the easiest thing” may not be technically correct as long as one values any sandboxing features or application store features which tie applications to accounts.
Work/personal phones, is my guess.
I’ve been thinking about getting a Fairphone2, so I can combine the sims on a single device.
I never said that I thought it was easy. What I said is that that problem had long ago been solved, as can be readily observed in other POSIX systems. Securely creating and administrating multiple accounts with their respective program access is what UNIX and its derivatives was made for. But the cynical market drive towards “appliances” deliberately places the vendor in the role of administrator, rather than trusting the buyer to make or delegate those decisions. For better or worse, it seems apparent that those corporations profit from devices and code sharing more information than can be considered secure for the users.
For example, when installing an application in MacOS, I can choose whether to install it for the current user, or all users. Because the file system and OS can handle permissions, and recognize distinct user-spaces.
Point being to not accept excuses that it would add undue cost or complexity to include functionality in a Linux or BSD phone which is universal elsewhere. GUIs of the past 20 years or so have readily demonstrated that power-user functionality can be easily hidden away from those users who find it confusing or undesirable.
Having these devices be insecure for users, and having that insecurity exploited by a corporate minority is ultimately a choice.
Unix was not designed to be secure. The whole SU/not SU design is bad and should be shot into space.
I used your exact words with no intention of selective quotation.
POSIX systems were hardly the first multi user operating systems nor the only ones. However there is nothing about POSIX that requires multiple interactive users and there have been plenty of POSIX system designs for only one interactive account.
Actually no, not as you phrased that. If you look into the history of UNIX and its derivatives, security was, as always, an afterthought. This is not to say there have not been derivatives designed specifically for secure operations under specific conditions but that as stated security was not the original intent.
But again, going back many years, there have been Unix and variant based appliances with only a single interactive user. This isnt new. For exmple, I dont know if you remember SCO Unix (at one time known as Xenix, but it was very popular for point of sale based systems. The single interactive user was a cash register terminal
There is nothing inherent to a GUI as you describe. Obviously one can in Mac OS do things which at the CLI require sudo permissions. Same for just about all other GUI variants these days.
When you get down to it being able to turn a network interface on or off in iOS or Android is in fact an administrative action…
Having these devices be insecure for users, and having that insecurity exploited by a corporate minority is ultimately a choice.
insecure for users? What?
I get that you are using “exploited by a corporate minority” in some political sense, but again, kinda What?
Meaning that it is easy now only because that work has already long since been done and become ubiquitous. Not that it was trivial to conceive of or implement in the first place.
I don’t mean security in the contemporary hardened install sense. Even in just the basic administration sense of “set it up so that various users have unambiguous access to resources”. That’s a low bar, but arguably phones don’t meet it, because they aim to be deceptive about who actually controls the device.
Time sharing and systems like Multix existed before Unix, so yes the work has already been done but you persist in an ahistorical understanding.
That bolded words there, I dont want to be rude, but when you can address each of these in reasonable detail, please revisit that point.
Technical inaccuracy followed by nonsequiter of ideology. A base install of Android or iOS these days actually does a very good job of separating permissions of non-interactive accounts vs what is essentially the user account and sandboxing.
So, how do you access the CLI and use sudo to administrate your phones? Rooting them typically voids the warranty, and even then these systems are missing the utilities to create and manage users and groups, and set program permissions.
It is hardly an ideological problem that if one is not the admin, one isn’t in control of their system. If it’s secured by somebody else, including against me as the user and nominal admin, then the technicalities of how they have secured it are more relevant to them than they are to me. Sandboxing is more secure than not, but it is undermined by allowing the apps to leak user data for use by others. The technical problem is how to have finer control of one’s system, rather than trusting all-or-nothing permissions set by the apps themselves.
It seems you wont or cant reply to any of the technical or theoretical issues and persist with ideological matters so I’m done. I dont wish to try and change your ideology, thats relatively pointless.
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What do you mean “reply to the issues”? You keep making statements which are tangential to a brief, simple point I made. You have not asked me any specific questions, and you have not answered any of mine. Thanks for “schooling” me with wikipedia links.
Yes, basic administration is not in itself a “security model”, but if you are prevented from administrating your system, you won’t be able to secure it anyway. That is the whole, very simple point. It is not meant to be a detailed history of operating systems or security models.
How is controlling one’s Android system an ideological rather than technical problem? Perhaps some ways in which trust models are defined have a component of ideology. But once that has been decided, how does one implement and enforce them on their phone, technically? Do computer security professionals explain to their customers that “Since you accept that there are back doors into your system, your push to have them patched is your own ideological problem”? I can imagine that would go over really well.
I’ll have to try one of the newer ones someday. The first (and only) tablet I got had nothing like that. Once you logged in, the only way to log out or switch users was to do a full device reset (which of course would remove all apps and data). It was a dealbreaker problem - kind of made it useless as a household device that could be left on the living room table for anyone to pick up and use. At least Chromebooks have user accounts.
