Stories like this, the Uber story, and the recent one about Google tracking location even when you opt out, are why I'm looking forward to Purism 5 with PureOS and kill switches.
http://wiki.c2.com/?TheKenThompsonHack
At some level, you have to trust or decide what is tolerable for you.
A solution for a few outliers doesn’t really influence the big picture.
I am very interested in what individuals/institutions support privacy at scale.
I am aware of the EFF. Who else?
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/all-effd-up-levine
>A solution for a few outliers doesn’t really influence the big picture.
There's nothing stopping anyone from buying a Purism 5. If someone doesn't care about their privacy, they don't deserve it. Freedom isn't free, and all that.
And once I give it that permission, how does the phone/OS prevent them from selling the data that I gave them permission to have?
It doesn’t.
Why would you think that? I don't need to give a weather app my location. It only needs to have one or more locations of interest to me. My weather widget pulls multiple locations for me, and has no access to my location data.
Apart from the fact that it doesn't actually exist yet.
Not to mention it's already a badly specced phone commanding top dollar being made by a small company that could easily go broke in a year.
I'm all for what they are trying to achieve and really hope they succeed, but history is full of privacy phones that have failed spectacularly.
For half the price I could get a flagship Xiaomi, flash LineageOS on it and have a completely degoogled high quality Android phone likely supported for most of the next decade.
Well, sure, I'll give you that point, but it's going to happen.
>it's already a badly specced phone commanding top dollar
The selling point isn't the specs. It's the RYF certification and kill switches. Even if they can't get the RYF, it's still a better option than anything else out there.
>being made by a small company that could easily go broke in a year
I really doubt that. They have a laptop business already. They've been doing hardware for a while. This one might ship months late, but I'm confident it will happen.
>For half the price I could get a flagship Xiaomi, flash LineageOS on it and have a completely degoogled high quality Android phone likely supported for most of the next decade.
Yep, and you still have a sealed battery, a backdoored baseband, and binary blobs. The iMX.8 is pretty sweet. It has open source GPU. Can't say that for mali or powervr. I can consider making Librem 5 my convergence device.
A fair call, but I'm of no importance to China and am betting on lineage lasting.
Time will tell. As snarky as my comment came across, I'm entirely keen for purism to win this uphill battle, but I won't be pre-ordering.