Runs on the Librem 5 Smartphone – Week 1

I was really excited about the Librem 5 (really, anything Purism is neat), and am still very interested but have had reservations regarding Purism ever since the Yale Privacy Lab published a few short tweets with the conclusion that they cannot recommend the Librem One services suite[1].

There have been a few other hiccups along Purism's way as well (0day on launch, ruffling the feathers of the FOSS community, etc.).

According to Forbes[2], in response to trackers being included in the Librem One suite, CSO Kyle Rankin said :

>"While we took efforts to disable tracking with code flags, a few days ago week we discovered that even with that it still had trackers in it,"

The article mentions:

>"Rankin reiterates that the company upstreamed the Librem One Chat app from the Riot Android app, and discovered those same trackers a few days ago."

Which, for a company almost solely built on the concept of privacy, I would expect an extremely thorough vetting of every line of code prior to product launch. When your target market is those who care about privacy the most, you're potentially dealing with customers whose lives depend on that very privacy.

I'd like to stay optimistic about all of the Purism products, and I hope to eventually be a customer. I think it might be prudent to wait a little bit though, until the wrinkles are ironed out.

[1]https://twitter.com/YalePrivacyLab/status/113903927498732748... [2]https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/05/06/puris...