Blackberry deserves props for experimentation and their surprising good OS 10, but if Priv is shorthand for privacy, then that's veering close to dishonesty.
Darn happy with my Passport though.
Darn happy with my Passport though.
I remember one experience very clearly from when the Priv first entered the market. I looked through the related web pages, curious about where Blackberry was going. I found plenty of marketing around tools that would notify you if various things went wrong in terms of privacy and security. However, I found literally nothing to state that the phone would actively prevent those things from going wrong or check with the user before performing actions they apparently considered significant enough to warn about. It was one of the most marketing-heavy, content-light, non-committal product sites I've seen in a long time.
Until today I don't think I've been there again. After reading the initial marketing, I just assumed the phone wasn't actually going to be significantly more secure or private than anyone else's or they'd have told us how it was instead of skirting around it repeatedly for the entire site. In fact, if memory serves, it was at the time based on a version of Android that predates some significant improvements in terms of app permissions and locking down what they can do, suggesting that contemporary models from competitors that used a later version of Android would actually have been much better than the Priv in at least some areas of security and privacy.
As long as all that's true, their stuff is secure. That's not confidence inspiring.