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Blackberry has decided to exit Pakistan by the end of 2015 rather than comply with government data retention requests:
Phone-maker Blackberry is to stop operating in Pakistan at the end of 2015 because of government requests to monitor customer data. The Pakistani government wanted to be able to monitor every message and email sent via its phones, it said. In a blogpost, it said it had decided to "exit the market altogether" over the row. It said Pakistan's demand was not to do with public safety but a request for "unfettered access".
In July, Pakistan's Telecommunications Authority told Blackberry the servers underpinning its messaging business would no longer be allowed to operate in the country, citing "security reasons". Marty Beard, chief operating officer at Blackberry, said the "truth" of the matter was Pakistan had wanted to look at all the traffic passing across its messaging servers but the phone company would not "comply with that sort of directive".
"Remaining in Pakistan would have meant forfeiting our commitment to protect our users' privacy. That is a compromise we are not willing to make," wrote Mr Beard.
This led Pakistan to tell Blackberry its servers could no longer operate in the country. Mr Beard said Blackberry did not support "backdoors" that would grant open access to customers' information and had never complied with such a request anywhere in the world.
Maybe they deserve more than a 0.5% share of the global smartphone market.
(Score: 3, Informative) by stormwyrm on Wednesday December 02 2015, @01:29AM
Given how Microsoft seems like they've long been the bitch of the NSA, and how they seem hell-bent on spying on all of the users of all of their operating systems for whatever reason; they appear to be going so far as to backport all of the spyware they built for Windows 10 to their older OSes, I wonder why you'd think that an MS phone was some kind of viable alternative. I think your best bet is one of those phones for which Replicant [replicant.us] can be installed, which mostly appear to be Samsung phones which are around 2-3 generations behind. At least you have Free Software there which is maintained by a community that cares about privacy and security.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 2) by Snow on Wednesday December 02 2015, @04:02AM
Thanks for the reply.
I think this (replicant) might be my next phone.