Digdeeper review of Librem One

Services Librem One
1

Not a good one:

https://digdeeper.neocities.org/ghost/email.html#Librem

A chat member has inquired about this one. Their modus operandi sounded nice:

Purism is a Social Purpose Corporation (SPC), which means we put social good above exploiting people.

So I decided to check them out, naively believing it (I guess the Mozilla situation has taught me nothing). The amount of personal data required for getting an account is the most I’ve ever seen out of any provider :

Billing First name is a required field. Billing Last name is a required field. Billing Country is a required field. Billing Street address is a required field. Billing Town / City is a required field. Billing State is a required field. Billing ZIP is a required field. Billing Phone is a required field. Shipping First name is a required field. Shipping Last name is a required field. Shipping Country is a required field. Shipping Street address is a required field. Shipping Town / City is a required field. Shipping State is a required field. Shipping ZIP is a required field. Please enter an address to continue.

What a shitshow. And you need all this info even if trying to pay using cryptocurrency. Librem is a paid provider, and you can only pay for a bunch of services together. This is like going into a store to buy bananas, but learning you can only get them in conjunction with apples - and you hate apples. Now, if you do want their VPN, chat and social media, the price might seem justified; but this is the E-mail report and a minimum of $8 per month for an E-mail is just too much compared to even the most expensive providers. Especially since Librem doesn’t seem too interested in privacy with all the personal data it’s trying to grab. The signup process alone is enough to drive someone away from Librem, but fuck it, I’ll dig into their privacy policy anyway. Aside from the empty posturing - such as We do not track you. or We do build products, software, and services that respect society and your privacy. - the only mildly useful information is that they keep temporary things for 30 days. Don’t expect the social purpose corporation (heh) to tell you about what exactly that consists of, though. Librem does support mail clients, which is the only real positive I can see about this service.

2

There’s kind of a distinction between privacy and anonymity.

Although I don’t agree with exactly the way the tuxphones article was written, or how it defines some things, or some of it’s metaphors, the distinction is very clear here.
I don’t think Librem One was ever advertised as an anonymous service.

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3

That “digdeeper” is indeed very shallow.

4

if you have bought any Purism product before then you already had to provide that information to receive your products … billing is a fickle thing …

if you want a shot at anonymity then … SELF HOST !

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