You can port a lot of things to a Pixel 3a, but the firmware has been end of life for years now. At the hardware level, its always vulnerable. The OS alone can not protect you, even if its up to date.

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[–] jnod4@lemmy.ca 5 points 5 months ago (1 child)

The smartphone is far from ewaste, great jack, with good camera, makes the perfect device for an mp3 player to take along hikes.

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[–] 9tr6gyp3@lemmy.world 0 points 5 months ago

As long as it never touches any network ever again and there is never anything personal installed on it ever again then it should be OK. Be sure to rip out the GSM and/or CDMA chipset, wifi, bluetooth, and NFC. When connecting it to another device through USB, make sure that device is offline and ADB mode is disabled. Remove all sim cards as well.

There are much better devices for your purpose than some old ass phone tho

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[–] erebion@news.erebion.eu 4 points 5 months ago (1 child)

Whatever. Still not a reason to constantly throw hardware away unless you have a specific threat model.

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[–] 9tr6gyp3@lemmy.world 1 point 5 months ago*

My threat model is anything vulnerable that can access a network should be gutted and smelted down if it has been abandoned from the manufacturer.

Don't throw it in the trash. Recycle the materials instead to rebuild newer better hardware.

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