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Garrett: The Freedom Phone is not great at privacy

 2 years ago
source link: https://lwn.net/Articles/891616/
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Garrett: The Freedom Phone is not great at privacy

[Posted April 17, 2022 by corbet]
Anybody who might be considering acquiring a "Freedom Phone" might want to have a look at Matthew Garrett's analysis first.

Anyway. We have a company that seems to be combining blockchain and MLM [multi-level marketing], has some opinions about Quantum Entanglement, bases the security of its platform on a set of novel cryptographic primitives that seem to have had no external review, has implemented an API that just hands out personal information without any authentication and an app that appears more than happy to upload all your contact details without telling you first, has failed to update this app to keep up with upstream security updates, and is violating the upstream license.

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Garrett: The Freedom Phone is not great at privacy

Posted Apr 17, 2022 8:47 UTC (Sun) by petkan (subscriber, #54713) [Link]

LOL, yet another "privacy" and "freedom" oriented company. Thanks for the detailed review, Matt!

Garrett: The Freedom Phone is not great at privacy

Posted Apr 17, 2022 8:56 UTC (Sun) by geuder (subscriber, #62854) [Link]

I had never heard about this phone. Maybe I haven't read my news or maybe because I live in Europe. The discussion on Hackernews explains that it's not freedom as in free software, but freedom as in MAGA. So nothing I missed, at least not in a technical context.

Garrett: The Freedom Phone is not great at privacy

Posted Apr 17, 2022 12:18 UTC (Sun) by jamescrake-merani (subscriber, #157540) [Link]

Suspicion amongst the MAGA crowd towards so-called 'big tech' companies is so high that other companies have entered the market to capitalize on this suspicion although, using the freedom phone as an example, their solutions aren't much better then what they're trying to replace.

What is striking is that I have seen very little discussion about our idea of freedom in these crowds (although I must admit some ignorance as I do not listen to much of their speech). Rather, they seem to be content with using other companies as long as they are not one of the 'big tech' companies. Social media platforms like Parler, Truth Social etc. don't seem much better to me especially in comparison to federated social media services which seem to be completely absent in these discussions which is funny because I hear Truth Social uses Mastodon.

Garrett: The Freedom Phone is not great at privacy

Posted Apr 17, 2022 13:18 UTC (Sun) by felix.s (guest, #104710) [Link]

Striking, but perhaps not surprising. Free software as a movement is pretty strongly left-coded. RMS himself is openly a socialist, and has been since way before the Bernie craze; even though his influence is waning now, he definitely set the tone here.

I mean, ‘open source’ as a term was pretty much explicitly coined to appeal to more right-wing (capitalist) types, and remains considerably more libertarian-coded to this day. It’s no accident.


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