This article is over 10 days old but it sounds to me that an increase in L5 sales (Liberty, USA, or otherwise) may occur:
Vive le France!
(They could also make a French version with “Liberté” embossed in the same spot “USA” is with French vocabulary & dictionary installed by default.)
Oui, biensur. However, the police will most likely still get the L5 owner’s position whenever he/she turns on the modem and/or wifi.
…and the owner’s identity.
The owner’s identity can be checked via phone number by every police station without getting any judge involved. That is afaik allowed and possible in any EU country.
What the Librem 5 would protect you from: Exposing any geolocation data if the kill switches are “ON”. And even if the modem is online, they mostly would only be able to collect the triangulation location data. GPS is afaik not directly attached to the modem hardware-wise and the modem is attached via USB. It cannot, without any further holes, access GPS information. That differs from usual smartphones today.
They would also not be able to turn on camera and microphone remotely. As far is I know this is also possible with at least modern Android smartphones.
Yes, good point.
That may be true, but what I meant was, as soon as the modem is turned on, the owner’s identity would become available for intercept, i.e. via the IMSI, IMEI, and any related phone number, whereas it would have been hidden while the modem was off.
In the U.S., obtaining subscriber identity, account info, and call records (metadata only) requires only an administrative subpoena signed by the relevant law enforcement agency supervisor.
Anything more than the basics - location data, contents of phone (including connected cloud storage), message content, etc., would require convincing a judge that it’s needed and relevant to the investigation, and is also authorized by the law.
(Just FYI.)
I can see it now for the French:
Liberté, égalité, vie privée!
(Puri.sm really needs to learn marketing slogans.)
Or a 6 second youtube video ad with medieval soldiers from a battlement throwing away their old Androids:
Feche le phone!
Wishful thinking. Most people don’t care about privacy and even the ones that do care will not shell out 1300$ for phone that barely works.
I blame poor marketing and salesmanship.
How much useless crap or fads have humans bought into over the past hundred years due to a simple clever sales scheme?
All is needed is to convince potential customers to buy some useful thing instead of some useless one! Just use the same techniques.
P.S. And add a Vargas girl style pic holding an L5.
You are probably right but perhaps the right question is: what percentage of mobile phone customers care about privacy? Given the large size of the market you don’t need more than a small percentage to care.
I can state as absolute fact: the passage of a similar law in my country some years ago was associated directly by me with the then future availability of my Librem 5. My Librem 5 couldn’t have come fast enough! (because all iPhones and Android phones can be considered potentially compromised by the government in my country - although I understand that there is zero transparency as to the scale of the problem i.e. it’s all done in secret).
There are various degrees of privacy-caring mobile users:
So, what demographic(s) are you suggesting?
I suppose the more appropriate question is how to define mobile users who care about privacy. My criteria is browser-based practices, but it can easily be operating system selection, network self-sufficiency products/services used, proxy front-ends, uBlock Origin mode, privacy camera covers, faraday sleeves, etc.
Indeed. Once you decide that you do care, you still have to decide how far you are going to go to do something about it.
Given the speculative nature of the OP (“may occur”) I don’t think we need to be too precise about numbers who care (in France) and numbers who care enough, say, to buy a phone dedicated to implementing privacy measures (in France).
Just between you and me … that depends on your threat model. If you are worried about your ISP or your government intercepting and/or interfering with your DNS requests then … OK. But handing over all your DNS lookups to Cloudflare could be a form of surveillance capitalism. So I prefer not to.
Sure, I have the same stance and do not use Cloudflare DNS-over-HTTPS in my browser configuration too. It is the first option provided in Firefox, and from what I recall, is also enabled by default on first installation.
I have a very long list of DNS recursive resolvers written in a LibreOffice document, and use it as a reference to compare against each other, but I have not updated it in a year or so since selecting one to use, so it is quite outdated by now.
I am not ready to run my own local recursive resolver just yet, but I have kept it in the back of my mind for quite a few years now.
