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If you’re concerned about privacy first and foremost, I’d say look in to LineageOS, you might already have a supported phone and you can throw it on your existing phone. It doesn’t support Google apps out of the box but you can install the Google services to get the Play Store and other stuff you might be used to on an Android phone. If you want to take it to the next level from there, you can try microG out, which is an open reimplementation of many of the Google services on Android. There’s even a community build that adds those bits into LineageOS.
For apps, @Pirate did a phenomenal job compiling a bunch of software that respects your privacy and is open source, give it a read! I have used a lot of the apps here for years, but I even learned of some cool new apps from this post.
If you need a new phone, I would say look into the Pixel 4a, it’s a newer device and is well supported by LineageOS so with community support you can likely see that 5+ year lifespan without it really slowing down. If you’re in Europe, you can look into the Fairphone. They’re not the fastest devices, but they are designed to be completely repairable and have at least a 5 year lifespan, most recently with their efforts to bring Android 9 to their five year old Fairphone 2. They’re also well supported by LineageOS so there’s likely to be support for even longer.
This won’t save you, baseband and tower meta analysis hook into palantir’s tracking modules. This is the answer someone who like ricing their machines gives you, all it does is provide an illusion of control and a feeling of being smart.
It’s possible you could get away from this if you trust your hardware enough, no? Like with Pinephone and switching all the hard switches off. I just mean for certain time periods where you may need a device but don’t want it pinging off anything.
No, meta analysis is done off connections to upstream towers and connections to the cell network. The problem isn’t your device, but the fact the network itself is fully tapped. 4g also uses a symmetric cypher and doesn’t contain e2e communication so once you touch the tower all data is unencrypted within the carrier network. You have problems tracking off Bluetooth, WiFi and the carrier connections and with the carrier connections you have a blob of source code which isn’t controlled by the operating system and is communicated through via an abstraction layer to another device on the carrier side that logs all low layer communication and all high layer communication. Deviations from standard use that the majority of the population performs are also checked as unusual as we learned from the Snowden leaks about people who turn their phones off, so if you and your friend both turn your phones off at the same time for a secret communication it’s listed as an event and can be back correlated if/when you become a person of interest.
Our saving grace is the people using these advanced systems are idiots.
The OP is looking for an introduction to free software, so I provided recommendations for what I would give someone looking for that. I wouldn’t deride that as being an “illusion of control” or a feeling of “being smart” because of things the user cannot control. The same reason I wouldn’t deride a user looking to use Ubuntu or Mint as their first Linux distro. You have to start somewhere, might as well learn in a friendly environment.
To answer your statement though on baseband monitoring, you’re right, there’s no way to avoid monitoring from the carrier or a third party with a stingray, short of using a phone without a modem in it to connect to a cell tower. No phone on the market has an open source modem either so you can only guess what it’s doing since it’s all proprietary code. Neither of these reasons would be a reason I would tell OP or any new person to privacy or security to prevent them from learning how to customize their phone or take their privacy back.
OP is looking for a phone focuses on privacy without specifying the target of who they are hiding from. If it’s just commercial entities, an iPhone is the correct choice, if it’s government then things become complicated, if they just want to learn how a phone works then lineage is fine and if they want to figure out how the cell network works they should be using osmoconbb. Their goal is nebulous, they never specified they wanted free software and the answer provided only provides an illusion of privacy and control.
If someone gets a Pixel I’d recommend that they use CalyxOS or GrapheneOS instead of Lineage, these two are better security wise.
