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Tech

Not Even the 'Snowden Phone' Can Guarantee Your Privacy

Cringe-worthy nickname aside, the security may reflect the pricetag.
Image: FreedomPop

The American company FreedomPop unveiled its Privacy Phone today—also known as the "Snowden phone" apparently—which is the latest entry in the secure phone space. As the company describes it, it's a Samsung Galaxy S II loaded with software that “encrypts your connection and protects you from malicious parties that could intercept your data.”

FreedomPop boasts that the extremely privacy conscious can plunk down just $189 in bitcoins for confidence that you’re browsing the internet via an anonymous VPN, while your calls and messages are encrypted.

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Whether or not that confidence is well-founded is a more complicated question. Before you opt into paying $10 a month for 50 MB of data (unlimited calls and texts are free, which is FreedomPop's thing) with the option of changing your number as often as you need to, ask yourself a few questions:

Will you send a message to someone who is using an unencrypted device? If so, then there’s one potential breach. Will you call a landline? There’s another. Are you hosting your email in the cloud somewhere like, say, on Gmail? Then your phone isn’t really the problem, it's every leaky service you're using.

Image: FreedomPop

I guess the most important question is: will anyone ever be interested in what’s on your phone? If so, then you’re Privacy Phone almost definitely isn't going to stop that breach, despite FreedomPop’s claims that 128-bit encryption is uncrackable. Thomas Drake, a former NSA agent who attempted to leak sensitive documents to the press in 2007told the New Yorker that he “would only trust 2048-bit level encryption schemes,” in an article explaining that cracking 128-bit encryption is now fairly easy for someone with the resources of a government. And FreedomPop’s freemium phone service is still piggybacking off the Sprint network, which has also been the subject of NSA surveillance.

The fact is, even the most secure cell phones can give away more than you want them to, especially smartphones—and especially if those who are inquiring have an anti-encryption budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars range. So it’s up to you to decide the most egregious thing about the "Snowden phone": the fact that Snowden had nothing to do with it, or the fact that it appears to fall short of its promise, especially compared to the (admittedly far more expensive) Blackphone.

To be honest, it doesn’t really seem like FreedomPop’s phone is an improvement over using mobile Tor or Seecrypt on a prepaid or existent Android smartphone. But even then, smartphones are inherently designed to connect to everything, and plugging the leaks isn't always easy. And if you're really going to buy a smartphone just to disable all the smart parts, you might as well stick with the gold standard: a burner phone that you snap in half after using, Breaking Bad-style.