2G privacy benefits?

K8y

Some phones no longer allow 2 G bandwidths, but is there any security or privacy advantage to switching to 2 G instead of 4 or 5 G? Is it harder for stingrays to surveil etc?

Novalissoide

K8y absolutely no benefits security-wise. Stick with the recommendations from;
https://grapheneos.org/

GrouchyGrape

K8y 2G/3G are legacy protocols with large amounts of code (and therefore attack surface) that should be avoided if possible.

https://grapheneos.org/features#lte-only-mode

de0u

K8y Many carriers no longer support 2G/3G at all, and the rest are working on ending support.

K8y I heard police and gov equipment aren't made for 2G surveillance as easily anymore, so wanted to verify if anyone knows this is true.

These days the police are genuinely quite unprepared to spy on 1G calls, but that doesn't bother them, because no 1G calls can be made.

Honestly, because carriers are ditching 2G/3G calling, it is probably easier for miscreants to get away with running fake 2G/3G cell sites, so turning on 2G/3G support probably increases risk.

GrapheneOS

K8y K8y If you care about network-level interception, 5G-only is the only thing you should use... 2G has extraordinarily insecure authenticated encryption. 2G is by far the easiest for unauthorized interception, followed by 3G, then 4G and then finally 5G which has started having almost reasonable cryptography (not quite).

K8y

well, I heard police and gov equipment aren't made for 2G surveillance as easily anymore, so wanted to verify if anyone knows this is true.

1qkv9ddu3so2irvz

By that logic Windows 95 is a very secure system.

Grapi

1qkv9ddu3so2irvz

Nowadays it is very hard to read a floppy disk or punched tape, so your data is pretty secure also without password protection :)