I felt this way about iPhone. My compromise was to only connect using a VPN. The goal wasn’t to keep my traffic private — it was so that I could have complete visibility and control over what the iPhone was talking to.
The idea was that my iPhone could be as nefarious as it wanted to be — it could never talk to anyone I didn’t want it to talk to because iptables stopped it, or something.
The project didn’t pan out, but I did end up using pihole a lot which felt like a good compromise.
I also discovered that iOS and cell carriers have a some kind of partnership to silently send each other text messages containing lots of unique looking identifiers, which was fun (REG-RESP?v=3&r=...&n=+555994321&s=FB87CD658A...etc). I used a niche IOT carrier for a while that showed me the complete SMS logs, including all these messages being sent multiple times a day.
I’m sure there’s some banal engineering reason for it but it’s not exactly heartening to find “secret” text messages being snuck out, by the dozen.
The idea was that my iPhone could be as nefarious as it wanted to be — it could never talk to anyone I didn’t want it to talk to because iptables stopped it, or something.
The project didn’t pan out, but I did end up using pihole a lot which felt like a good compromise.
I also discovered that iOS and cell carriers have a some kind of partnership to silently send each other text messages containing lots of unique looking identifiers, which was fun (REG-RESP?v=3&r=...&n=+555994321&s=FB87CD658A...etc). I used a niche IOT carrier for a while that showed me the complete SMS logs, including all these messages being sent multiple times a day.
I’m sure there’s some banal engineering reason for it but it’s not exactly heartening to find “secret” text messages being snuck out, by the dozen.