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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 bobthecimmerian on Thursday March 07 2019, @12:17PM (1 child)

    by bobthecimmerian (6834) on Thursday March 07 2019, @12:17PM (#811112)

    The important feature of this phone is that it has hardware switches for everything you want to disable. So you can have the device off and be certain it's off - there have been rumors, I'm not sure of the validity, that for Android and iPhone devices some models allow remote access to location, cameras and microphones even when the device is off.

    Even if those rumors are not true, or are not true yet, you can have the Purism device on and be completely certain the camera and microphone are off. That's still a huge step forward from every other Android and iPhone device.

    If you want genuine privacy, including location and network usage metadata privacy, you can't use a cellular network device at all. No individual company can fix that, ever, unless some kind of global peer to peer mesh wireless network takes off. I don't think anyone was expecting Purism to fix that problem.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 28 2019, @03:26PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 28 2019, @03:26PM (#821353)

    there was a court case in NY in the early 2000's where a mob boss got convicted based on evidence gathered that way
    it wasn't a phone software thing, it was functionality of the hardware (think Intel and there above the OS mode)