Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Another “secure” smartphone has emerged, this time from MVNO startup FreedomPop. Dubbed the Privacy Phone, and more jokingly the Snowden Phone, the device includes encryption for voice and text and a VPN for data usage. This device follows Silent Circle’s issuing of Blackphone — a smartphone running on a version of Android created called PrivatOS, and a phone from Boeing called Black that is designed to self-destruct if tampered with.
VISUAL CONTEXT: AMERICANS AND THE NSA
Source: Pew Research and The Washington Post
FreedomPop — which is partnered with Clearwire and Sprint — offers cheap data plans (with a big chunk of free data as bait). The company’s business model was designed to make money off of the specific devices users have to purchase in order to run on those cheap plans. The Privacy Phone is next in that lineup, and is a modified version of the Galaxy S2, according to the Wall Street Journal.
But a few hurdles lie in wait for FreedomPop, hurdles not faced by Silent Circle or Boeing. Consider FreedomPop’s history in technology as opposed to the other two. Silent Circle is renowned for its work in security and encrypted communications; it shuttered its encrypted email service last year after the NSA leaks for fear of becoming complicit in providing service that could be tampered with by the U.S. government. Silent Circle wrote to its customers at the time:
Silent Mail has thus always been something of a quandary for us. Email that uses standard Internet protocols cannot have the same security guarantees that real-time communications has. There are far too many leaks of information and metadata intrinsically in the email protocols themselves. Email as we know it with SMTP, POP3, and IMAP cannot be secure…We are still working on innovative ways to do truly secure communications. Silent Mail was a good idea at the time, and that time is past.
So a secure phone produced by it and Spain-based smartphone startup Geeksphone seems like a good idea, despite its ability to only communicate to other encrypted devices and its running price of $630. Boeing is not the go-to company many people have in mind when they think of encrypted communications, but the company does boast a global fleet of airplanes that put it in an advanced technology category of a different kind. FreedomPop is considered a startup — a disruptive one, but a startup nonetheless. And with a burgeoning place in telecom, the company is just getting its name out there. It could take some more aggressive convincing for customers to buy a Privacy Phone, but perhaps the $189 price tag will do the trick.
