11 ms·
The Freedom Phone is not great at privacy
- formerkrogemp 4y ago
- Jason_Protell 4y agoFreedom Phone comes with Newsmax and OANN apps pre-installed. This takes red flags to a whole new level. https://www.freedomphone.com/ https://www.freedomphone.com/
- spaetzleesser 4y agoThe website states "Pre-Loaded Apps Some of the most popular banned & unbanned conservative sites & apps. Come pre-loaded directly on your Freedom phone." It's basically "Conservative Phone"
- Commodore63 4y ago[flagged]
- 1270018080 4y agoI've been cancelled! Says the wealthy celebrity on a media tour.
- jazzyjackson 4y ago"con phone" for short
- Beltalowda 4y agoThe guy in the Freedom Phone video seriously compared Donald Trump to MLK and Abraham Lincoln. lol? He also says "we don't ban apps, period", and the website even calls it "truly uncensorable" – I wonder how that works, but there's no technical details. I also wonder how they'll deal with spam, scams, malware, and other stuff of, ehm, questionable value that will inevitably pop up. I couldn't find much of this "truly uncensorable" app store on the Freedom Phone website, other than the name "ClearAPPS", so I assume it belongs to ClearOS. The ClearOS website is anything but clear though; even the corporate maze sites of HP, IBM, Lenovo, etc. are more clear than that ... thing. I eventually found https://www.clearos.app https://www.clearos.app, and I assume that must be it(?) I installed it on Android Emulator, and it's installed as "ClearAPPS", so I guess so. The thing bills itself as "The Marketplace Built On the security of Decentralized Storage", whatever that may mean. If I press "News" on the app's homepage there are exactly four apps: "Fox News", "Fox Nation: Celebrate America", "America's Voice", and "Just The News". Actually, that's not true: if I select an app and go back I have 8 apps: the app list gets duplicated. If I select "Categories" and go to "News" I see much more. As will surprise probably no one, the entire thing is a buggy piece of crap. When you first start their app it downloads the repository list from their servers; this must be the "truly uncensorable decentralized storage" they're talking about shrug. I couldn't find any clear Terms of Service for this entire thing in either the app or on the website. Source isn't available either as near as I can find; ClearOS has a GitHub, but last update is from 2019. [1]: https://www.clear.software/pages/marketplace-terms-of-service https://www.clear.software/pages/marketplace-terms-of-servic...
- actionablefiber 4y agoThat marketing video on the homepage is... not particularly convincing, and watching it gives me secondhand embarrassment.
- JKCalhoun 4y agoHa ha, the "PatriApp" store. Is this guy a Libertechian?
- brendoelfrendo 4y agoDoes that video... actually have the "Activate Windows" watermark in the thumbnail?
- can16358p 4y agoHow did they even manage to put that watermark there in the first place? Did they just take a screenshot from an unactivated Windows machine? This whole project is a joke.
- exikyut 4y ago...It does! I honestly don't know what to do with this information. Is this an intentional message? It's extremely overt.
- kadoban 4y agoI wonder if it's similar to how some phising emails will contain intentional grammar and spelling errors. I've been told that this works as a filter, since savvy people will be put off by such things leaving only the easy targets.
- Wistar 4y agoWow. With "secondhand embarrassment" you have deftly labeled a feeling I have had so many times in my life but have never been able to succinctly name.
- 4y ago
- JKCalhoun 4y agoWow. Is this a parody phone or something from The Onion?
- callalex 4y ago“They’re not sending their best.”
- walrus01 4y agoReality has become indistinguishable from the onion since somebody actually built and shipped a five blade razor
- glandium 4y agoReality overcame the Onion when somebody actually built and shipped a seven blade razor. I wish I were making this up.
- manuelabeledo 4y agoThey went full circle and now Gillette is selling a premium razor for sensitive skin… with two blades. No kidding: https://gillette.com/en-us/products/razors-trimmers-and-blades/skinguard-sensitive-skin-razor https://gillette.com/en-us/products/razors-trimmers-and-blad...
- Trouble_007 4y agoJillette, the best the Gullible Man can Get! - Now with over 24 rotating nano-blabes!
- squarefoot 4y agoI think this also happened years ago in a whole different context when some marketing genius invented the "shampoo without balm".
- Proven 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- breakfastduck 4y agoAnything that includes bloatware is untrustable. No question. Why even bother? You can't seriously run a project like this, add a load of bloatware, and expect to be trusted. Even that misjudgment is enough to understand that the people running this have no genuine interest in user privacy. Talk about undercutting your own reason for existing.
- im_down_w_otp 4y agoI think you might be misattributing their reason for existing.
- fmajid 4y agoAnything referencing blockchain or cryptocurrencies is a scam. That also applies to the original Signal.
- manuelabeledo 4y agoI would say that there are scenarios where blockchains are legitimately useful.
- maccard 4y agoSuch as?
- gkop 4y agoBut that headphone jack.
- toolz 4y agoSomehow with multiple comments about how embarrassing the phones association with republican organizations is, no one seems to be talking about how they backup your messaging data in a possibly insecure way and exposing peoples email address if you have an associated phone number. Surely I can't be the only one who finds it incredibly frustrating to see how many people think being republican associated is noteworthy when in the context of scary privacy violations. It would seem to me you're just encouraging republicans to buy this phone. Surely, the privacy conscious people in this community want privacy for everyone regardless of political affiliations, right?
- ceejayoz 4y ago> It would seem to me you're just encouraging republicans to buy this phone. I don't see anyone in this thread doing this.
- loeg 4y ago> Somehow with multiple comments about how embarrassing the phones association with republican organizations is As of this writing, no comments exist that match that description. One comment mentions that it's a phone marketed at conservatives, but does not describe that association as embarassing.
- testbjjl 4y agoFront running victimization.
- filmgirlcw 4y agoI haven’t seen any comments encouraging anyone to buy this phone. If you take making fun of the phone and the people dumb/gullible enough to buy the phone, “encouraging republicans to buy this phone,” well, I don’t know what to tell you. If someone is so full of spite for the evil leftists that they’ll run to anything some of those users make fun of, that’s on them. But no one thus far has encouraged anyone to buy this piece of shit product.
- 4y ago
- spicyusername 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ceejayoz 4y agoWikipedia has a good summary for anyone unfamiliar; it's a $120 phone whitelabeled and sold for $500. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umidigi_A9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umidigi_A9
- AureliusDreamer 4y agoLove the irony that the "American Conservative" Freedom phone is just a generic phone from a Chinese tech company...
- jimmygrapes 4y ago
- jimmygrapes 4y agoCouldn't edit on mobile, sorry. https://hothardware.com/news/us-government-subsidized-lifeline-android-phones-riddled-malware https://hothardware.com/news/us-government-subsidized-lifeli... Not the best writeup but not the worst. I experienced this myself.
- vlovich123 4y ago> The other part of the concern is that the only recourse is to uninstall the updater. However, that means users could miss out on critical security patches and other goodies. In other words, choose your poison. This reads like utter nonsense. If the software updater provided to you by the manufacturer is delivering malware to you, why on earth would you bother trusting “security updates” it provides to you. Unless there’s any actual evidence, given that the researchers admit the installed apps don’t actually contain malware, it all reads like a bunch of unnecessary scaremongering.
- lallysingh 4y ago> There is some debate as to whether these findings constitute the malware label, as opposed to PUPs (potentially unwanted programs). According to Sprint, its own testing has not uncovered any malware on the U686CL.
- duxup 4y ago> Remote Frequency Health Tuning through Quantum Entanglement What is that supposed to be?
- ceejayoz 4y agoA little sci-fi sprinkle on an old scam. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_medicine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_medicine
- can16358p 4y agoProbably some "holographic bracelet" stuff. In other words: BS.
- Trouble_007 4y ago>"holographic bracelet" Oo! Is it radioactive? : <https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=news: 'radioactive holographic bracelet' https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=news: 'radioactive hologr...>
- motohagiography 4y agoReads a bit like the ANOM phone honeynet playbook being reused but on some oddly specific domestic extremists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANOM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANOM
- walterbell 4y agoUpstream Signal was already questionable with mandatory telco identifier and social graph disclosure, yet this manages to make it even worse.
- Casteil 4y agoThis certainly isn't the first example of a sketchy/deceptive product targeted at a conservative audience, and it won't be the last... Grifters have found an easy target in leveraging outrage & persecution fetish, and for all their bluster - their privacy & security practices are typically laughable at best.
- hunterb123 4y ago[flagged]
- iinnPP 4y agoAs an observation I would note that all marketing I have come across for this device has aimed at people concerned about privacy. I am concerned when privacy and freedom have somehow turned into a right wing signal.
- trelane 4y ago"freedom" has long been associated with the right in the US. Concern about large companies asserting their outsize influence being associated with the right is a new development, as is the right's focus on privacy and security.
- smsm42 4y agoNot too long. The left used to care about freedom until they owned the academia, the entertainment and most of the major press, and then they decided the freedom is no longer required. It happened not so long ago. Then the woke movement rose where expressing thoughts diverging from the dogma is equated to violence, and this of course doesn't need any freedom.
- walterbell 4y agoJolla's Linux-based Sailfish (descendant of Nokia Maemo) runs on Sony Xperia 10 II (2020 device), https://jolla.com/sailfishx-5/ https://jolla.com/sailfishx-5/
- summm 4y agoThe hardware is quite underwhelming though. Sony as always deliberately crippling their mid-level phone to protect sale of their flagships...
- manuelabeledo 4y agoIs this true, though? Their mid range phones are usually $400-$500 cheaper than their mainstream flagships.
- AussieWog93 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- alkjlkljlg 4y ago
- alkjlkljlg 4y ago
- alkjlkljlg 4y ago
- alkjlkljlg 4y ago
- alkjlkljlg 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- exikyut 4y agoI found more info on the frequency thing: https://www.clearhealth.coach/clearscan-remote.html https://www.clearhealth.coach/clearscan-remote.html After scrolling, and scrolling, and scrolling some more ("is this literally peddling clairvoyance?") I finally encounter a... DNA test kit at the bottom of the page. Oh. So this is either the internet equivalent of overnight infomercial TV (oversell oversell oversell) or they actually are doing Weird Stuff to the DNA that gets sent in. Going further and checking out https://www.clearhealth.coach/ClearTUNE.html https://www.clearhealth.coach/ClearTUNE.html, the latter does seem to be the case: they've apparently come up with the idea that DNA is "quantum-entangled" and that when you send your DNA swab off to their lab, exposing that DNA swab to frequency (how?) transmits supposed benefits back to you via a "quantum link". Congratulations, you giant acorns, you've just provided all the raw material to enable some unfortunate numpty with us-vs-them syndrome to come along and "discover" the conspiracy of But What Are All The Other Testing Companies Doing To DNA They Might Be Transmitting Harmful Frequencies Making People Stupid??? Please stay a niche. Please stay a niche. Oh, good, it's $500, hopefully that prevents it from scaling. *Headdesk* The unhinged/unbounded nature of the way this has been presented sadly only serves to weaponize the impact of any reactive conspiracy theories: the claims this makes about purported benefits (there's a list just above the price section, which includes such humdingers as "EMF protection", "essential nutrition", "GMO detox", and "injury regeneration", along quite a few more) are entirely vacuous and without substance (understandable and par the course) - but if you flip this sort of non-closed-ended mindset around in a what-if setting, no amount of substantiation and concrete data will fill the sort of false information vacuum (for want of a better way to put it) that gets created. (On a side note, it's curious how everything in the aforementioned list fits reasonably comfortably into "can be influenced by the placebo effect". The bit about "Covid Care" neatly sidesteps claiming significant effect too. Really gives me the impression this was definitely sniff-tested by a lawyer or two - whoops, there go several bits of plausible deniability out the window...) Poking around the little web of shell^Winterconnected organizations this setup has cobbled together, I noticed: - MLM identified at https://www.clearcellular.org/ https://www.clearcellular.org/ - down the bottom, "reward yourself": "...a robust rewards program for those who refer their friends and family." - The little "made in china" stock image at the bottom of https://clearfoundation.co.nz/ https://clearfoundation.co.nz/ is cute - They really do appear to have registered co.com to get clear.co.com, but despite co.com having an A record the IP times out, nice - After drowning in the word "decentralized" everywhere on all the cryptocurrency fluff, https://clearfoundation.co.nz/webwallet https://clearfoundation.co.nz/webwallet obtusely notes front-and-center that "This password encrypts your private key. This does not act as a seed to generate your keys." ...k - While poking around https://www.clear.co.com/clearcenter https://www.clear.co.com/clearcenter I was curious about the VM offeri--oh it was shut down. Why is it the 2nd callout? - Clicking around between different websites I cannot straightforwardly figure out what any of them do. Yes there are PDFs and value propositions and case studies and interconnections but there's so much information it's overwhelming and I cannot see straight. Oh. That's the strategy. Wait where did all my money go??? ...What business overheads? Consulting? Consulting for what? What have I actually gotten out of this? I was wondering if HPE even realized what they were associating with. I now wouldn't be surprised if they don't realize themselves.
- derevaunseraun 4y agoApparently the creator was 22 at the time. I wonder if he ever kept the phones in a warehouse, or just used dropshipping. Really not a bad business idea on his part, just highly unethical. I'd imagine you could just send the factory a custom ROM for the device, provide them with custom branding, and have them ship to the buyer's doorstep at a $380 markup. No warehouse or investment necessary, just a store website and a bunch of marketing $$$
- ggm 4y agoPretty much all privacy advocates, right and left, meet in the middle with the cryptography mathematicians who broadly speaking are apolitical about maths, if nothing else. Their common points being do not roll your own and publish and check everything in your protocol model and codebase The eternal vigilance of checking your security model. It's a cost.
- r00tanon 4y agoAnd Nunes in charge of building another Twitter. Another in a long line of sad jokes in the same vein as the "Freedom Phone".
- h0l0cube 4y agoThere's a Darknet Diaries episode that points out how a lot of 'privacy' phones turn out to be honeypots https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/105/ https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/105/
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jll29 4y agoSince you can't trust any company, and you're not going to build your own device from first principles, best to avoid mobile devices alltogether. Get an old pre-owned Nokia for phone calls and use laptop-based messaging if you need it. I wrote a messaging app based on one-time pad encryption but ended up not using it due to poor-quality random numbers available to me (you can buy external random devices but I don't trust any vendor). Always remember Leidner's First Law: "Security is an illusion."
- yowlingcat 4y agoWe live in 2022. Eschewing modern inventions and "returning to the wilderness" is a rhetorical cop out. The problem has nothing to do with taking a "since you can't trust any company" approach is you avoid the reality of the situation -- which is that certain companies index lower than others. The company making this phone seems a little dubious.
- tentacleuno 4y agoFor anyone moderately competent with Android / who uses a custom ROM, the Freedom Phone looks like an absolute joke after 5 minutes. If you look at videos of it from social media influencers, you can clearly see how it's basically a LineageOS clone with apps like "Freedom Store" (Aurora Store) included. It's not at all good for privacy. (I'm sure if I went back to look at reviews of the Freedom Phone, I could point out another 10 open-source projects they blatantly copied and slapped their own name onto.) On the point of social media influencers, I remember how one commentator asked if it was running iOS. This goes to show how much forethought and research went into the influencers' demos of this phone. IMO it casts a bad light over all of them (not that I saw them in a good light anyway). That being said, it is quite curious how many people believed the marketing and bought the phone. It has to be said that not nearly enough overall research was done, and a lot of people suffered the consequences of that (and still don't realise to this day).
- upofadown 4y ago>It's ok, though, each upload has some sort of nominally unique identifier associated with it, so it's not trivial to just download other people's backups. This part confuses me. If it matters who ends up with your backups that implies that the backups are not protected. Then wouldn't you be more concerned about access to your backups by the Freedom Phone people?
- knorker 4y ago> We have a company that seems to be combining blockchain and MLM It's not a stretch to say that the whole Blockchain industry IS MLM.
- mike503 4y agoI find it amusing their options actually repeat themselves. So I am assuming this was mocked up in photoshop and not even double checked. https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0588/5385/1291/files/say-hello-img.png?v=1628150393 https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0588/5385/1291/files/say-h...
- mike503 4y ago70% restocking fee too. Rererences 3G radios, but do any providers even support that anymore? No 5G mentioned. Of course. :p
- tentacleuno 4y agoIt sounds like the SKU is really old then, if it doesn't even support 4G.
- mike503 4y agoAnd this just feels weird. https://www.clear.co.com/leadership-team https://www.clear.co.com/leadership-team