I found out that my mom is using an older phone that serves her just fine, but last recieved updates in 2021.

Realistically, how dangerous is this? What are the scenarios that could potentially happen with a phone that out of date?

She may be open to something like lineage OS, but I don’t want to make her phone less familiar for her, which would be harder to use. She is not very techy but also not fearful of a little tinkering. I don’t live near her so she will not have anyone knowledgeable to troubleshoot if the need arises.

I’m not a infosec person at ALL so I genuinely don’t know what she is exposed to.

Let me know if I should post this in another community instead.

  • otp@sh.itjust.works
    1·
    1 day ago

    Thank you for this detailed response!

    I have a Pixel, which has 5 years of security updates. That would probably get me up to the point where I’d want to change the battery. But I’m not convinced a newer phone would have anything for me other than better security updates, so it’d be hard to justify the price.

    There’s also the fact that new phones can still have security vulnerabilities.

    Since my phone is a flagship phone, I feel comfortable that if there are unpatched security issues discovered, they’d be caught by the public pretty quickly and I could make decisions from there…I just have to hope I’m not a “patient zero”, lol

    I may have to get a “burner phone” for any sketchier activities to be safe, though…lmao

    Is that a relatively reasonable course of action?