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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: 4, Informative) by exaeta on Thursday March 07 2019, @12:06AM (1 child)

    by exaeta (6957) on Thursday March 07 2019, @12:06AM (#810931) Homepage Journal
    The entire point is that the modem does not have control of your entire operating system, just the communications with your cell tower. So with this approach, if your app encrypts data, the modem cannot backdoor the app by bypassing the operating system. In other words, it removes the ability of cellular providers to inject aribitrary code into kernel space and takes away their root access. Sure, the modem still isn't open source, but by limiting what it's physically connected too we can prevent it from compromising the rest of the device.
    --
    The Government is a Bird
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 07 2019, @09:34AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 07 2019, @09:34AM (#811088)

    Wake me up when they get the FSF RYF certification or even some other credible party's declaration.

    For now all we have is their soothing words and slick marketing, much like any android or ios turd.

    They might be in it for real but all we have now is hot air.