I understand my contribution may arrive a bit late, still I would like to share my 2cents of wisdom.
I personally find hard to trust any solution that is not
open-source AND
community developed.
While the point of the first part (open-source) may be obvious to some it is still worth to mention that neither Apple iOS nor Blackberry OS are open source.
Yes, there has been a lot of marketing from those two companies, but we still have to remember that Blackberry was banned by the UAE and Pakistan, until they "complied" with the local government requirements, afterwards they were allowed to sell again their services over there. And we still have to remember that Apple encryption uses asymmetric encryption and that Apple has the key of the server holding all the public keys. I don't want to get into too much detail here, just remember that Fortune told us a few months ago that about 20% of all employees are willing to sell their credentials, 50% of them for less than $1,000. (the San Bernardino/FBI unpaid advertisement in favour of Apple had to do with something else, reading encrypted content. About which, just search for companies in San Francisco area who are able to dump iPhone flash on an external computer and then crack the 6 or 10 digit password with a PC in ten minutes).
Anyway, in view of all the news that we have been fed with, trusting blindly someone is something we should not take it lightly.
As for the second part, "community developed". We need to remember that there are companies that have been shut down because they were required to provide details of their clients (does anyone remember Lavabit for one?).
There are also companies (Yahoo?) that simply didn't care and decided to spy on ALL e-mails. Right, all e-mails.
What about the famous "warrant canary" ? Do you know what it is? And, since I read above someone talking about Silent Circle. Do you know that they removed their "warrant canary" last June? Do you know that the "warrant canary" has been missing from Reddit since 2015?
Now, either we take the subject seriously, and we start analyzing all the bits and pieces that could compromise our privacy, or it just becomes another gossip and an overall waste of time.
So, if anyone develops any proprietary solution becomes instantly a liability. And there is no place on earth where he can hide.
Not just from the spying governments, but also from the hackers. Allow me to open another can of worms.
All cellular networks have serious vulnerabilities that allow almost anyone to locate, impersonate and tap every call, message or internet data traffic of any cellphone worldwide, regardless of the brand, OS release and location. I have explained this at length on Quora for those who are interested in this detail (you can check the videos on our website too if you like)
So what are we left with?
Only open-source, community developed software, running on a phone that does not connect to a cellular network, but it can connect to the Internet through the WiFi (I dare anyone to find a device by just having its mac address, on the Internet).
Well, that is what we do. Untraceable, Encrypted, Anonymous smartphones that communicate with each other triangulating each call (message or e-mail) over at least two VPNs and jumping over at least 3 to 5 countries. And to avoid any illegal use of our devices, we allow only to communicate with each other.
We do not allow any sort of "interaction" with non secure lines. As I am saying in these days, i know a person that would be U.S. president by now if would have understood the point of carrying two phones instead of one.
I will appreciate any comment or suggestion or ideas on how to make our devices even safer than what they are now. Please note that we are only focused on privacy, not on megapixels, megahertz and gigabytes.
P.S. I found your post because we also load a bitcoin wallet on our untraceable phones, for those who need to carry some cash with them while travelling.
p.p.s. On our phones you cannot install apps, of any sort, So in some ways it is difficult to change their behaviour (hacking them). Yes, not even updates. If an update becomes necessary to protect the privacy of our customers, we send them a new phone as we do not trust OTA updates and we don't manage any update server (would be another liability).
https://www.silentcircle.com/buy/here's the one. you sure do pay for privacy though and there appears to be some type of subscription model.
personally i'd stick to dumb phones and do my computing on a laptop.
Please, ECB, all "dumb" phones or burners are absolutely unsafe. Check our answers on Quora or ask me directly if you like
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That advert made me laugh. It bangs on about privacy, yet made the school boy error of showing the phone has Google and Playstore on the phone.
If someone cares about their privacy, they wouldn't be using Google or Playstore (which requires proprietary gapps installed on phone) in the first place.
Buffer Overflow, beside the fact I like your nick name, you are absolutely right!
