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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   
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

• Re:nothing to see here Re:nothing to see here (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @10:49PM (2 children)

  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @10:49PM (#810903)

  I don't see anyone offering a worse alternative either... It's always the same offer: the proprietary GSM modem controls the rest of the unit. But you get to pick the color of the phone!!!

  If compromising on privacy/security is not an option, or anything serious is at stake (e.g. political activism or journalism in a sensitive area), it is advised to avoid using a telephony-enabled device at all. -- https://replicant.us/freedom-privacy-security-issues.php [replicant.us]

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• Re:nothing to see here Re:nothing to see here (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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  • Re:nothing to see here (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.

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