[sandwichbop]

Depends on what you want to do with your phone. The first elephant in the room is your phone plan, I use Tracfone for my phone since it's no contract and pay as you go, you can buy service minutes from the store without ever putting your name on your unlocked device.

Next best thing I started doing was using my phone less, as if I didn't have a phone. I mostly only use it for text messages and nothing else. I don't answer phone calls, I do everything via email on another device. I sometimes even leave home without my phone on me. Basically offloading the privacy issues to other devices like your laptop/desktop as much as you can since it's so much easier to control things like location access compared to a phone. But you may not way to do this, it depends on what features you want while which you can forgone on a phone.

[deepburner]

Yeah. Any mobile network access is basically a beacon for your location but I doubt there's a very good way of getting around that. My main use cases for the smartphone are pretty much occasional messaging, the banking application, GPS/maps and listening to music. Even though Spotify is more convenient than I'd like to admit I think that portion can be handled easily with a portable mp3 player. I'm pretty unsure about how I want to handle the rest though.