Are there 5G “Feature Phones?”
There have been several stories posted to HN this week on the theme of apps and mobile operating systems spying on people, phoning home with data about the user. As we move into the 5G future are companies still making non-smart phones/devices that simply don't have the attack surface for surveillance capitalism to exploit?
The network equipment is compromised worse than the phones (network operators have the same issue smartphone users do where they can't actually get shells on their own equipment) and it already knows enough about you to be an issue. Anything that connects to the cell network is always a problem.
Any phone, even a dumb phone have an attack surface. It's probably worse than a high end smartphone as they are cheap phones without much focus on code security.
Even feature phones have OS today, most common is KaiOS. It's not spying as much, but it's still capable of it.