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Librem5 - Purism Avoids Admitting it Does Not have Better Privacy When Used as a Phone

posted by martyb on Wednesday March 06 2019, @07:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the how-free-is-it,-anyway? dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Someone shared on Trisquel's forums a direct email communication with Purism revealing the way the company avoids being fully transparent about the fact that their device does not offer better privacy when used *as a phone* — it has privacy advantages only when the phone functionality is completely turned off, in which case the questioner claims it is nothing more than a pocket (or even stationary) PC.

Source:

https://trisquel.info/en/forum/librem5-and-why-i-am-no-longer-interested

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Absolutely.Geek on Wednesday March 06 2019, @08:39PM (2 children)

    by Absolutely.Geek (5328) on Wednesday March 06 2019, @08:39PM (#810858)

    on point 2; I use signal on cell data for calls and messages; not sure if you mean the Librem only does encrypted calls on WiFi (no I didn't read TFA).
    Also I live in NZ not sure if there are restrictions on what you can do where you live.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 07 2019, @11:52AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 07 2019, @11:52AM (#811106)

    Unless you are using 160 character or less TEXT messages, all your non-phone calls are going over IPv4/v6 anyways. The MMS provider service, at least for ATT/T-Mobile/etc is already using IP on private address ranges on the backend for passing your messages around. And with LTE, as I understand it, so are phone calls. With that said, there is no reason to be using phone numbers for private calls anymore. They weren't REALLY private in the analog days except due to the lack of pervasive recording, and today we know that recording is normal and handled by the NSA, FBI and/or CIA depending on who they are hiding it under to avoid the citizenry finding out.

    If you're trying to keep your communications/encryption keys private, not your location, the real question is if the cellular modem is properly isolated from the main system SoC. If it is, and there is no way for the cellular modem to either access system ram, or exploit the OS to gain system level privileges, then the Purism 5 is a good investment. If you are concerned with location tracking, then yes Wifi is a better bet, where coverage is available.

  • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday March 07 2019, @12:19PM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Thursday March 07 2019, @12:19PM (#811113) Journal

    Right, according to the response from Purism, you can't use the encrypted call features over cellular data. They say it can only be used on wifi or ethernet. Seems to be a limitation of the phone, not the network, although I can't understand what the reason would be unless it's an attempt at a security feature.