Is Your Cellphone NSA-Proof? No? Well, This One Is
Stop the government from listening to your calls with something better than a foil hat.
Since we all learned the NSA has been keeping much closer tabs on everyone than we thought, privacy has become a big concern for people. You no longer have to be paranoid to think Big Brother is watching, since he probably is. Don’t worry. There’s a new smartphone that claims to be NSA-proof.
Introduction to Blackphone from BLACKPHONE on Vimeo.
Given people’s increased interest in privacy, we’re in no way surprised to see a market rising up to meet the demand. We’ve already seen a few products that try to assuage people’s paranoia, but this is the first smartphone we’ve seen built specifically for the purpose of protecting the user’s privacy from the NSA and anyone else looking to snoop.
The Blackphone is a team effort by companies Silent Circle and Geeksphone in Switzerland. Everything about it, from the hardware to the custom-built Android variant “PrivatOS,” is about security and privacy. However, they’re actually very open about the whole thing; the software used is all open source.
Exact specs for the phone aren’t out yet, but we expect to see them at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona next month when the phone is debuted officially. The developers promise it will be a high-end phone, but we’re also willing to bet that specs won’t be as important a draw for their customers as keeping the guv’ment from listening in.
You can find out more about the phone on its site, Blackphone.ch.
(via Mashable, image via Blackphone)
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