Isnt the entire amazon marketplace doing the same? Marking up cheap white label alibaba products by a couple 100%s and selling it to americans?. And then bragging about making millions with "dropshipping"
Anything that includes bloatware is untrustable. No question.
Why even bother? You can't seriously run a project like this, add a load of bloatware, and expect to be trusted.
Even that misjudgment is enough to understand that the people running this have no genuine interest in user privacy. Talk about undercutting your own reason for existing.
Apparently the creator was 22 at the time. I wonder if he ever kept the phones in a warehouse, or just used dropshipping.
Really not a bad business idea on his part, just highly unethical. I'd imagine you could just send the factory a custom ROM for the device, provide them with custom branding, and have them ship to the buyer's doorstep at a $380 markup. No warehouse or investment necessary, just a store website and a bunch of marketing $$$
For anyone moderately competent with Android / who uses a custom ROM, the Freedom Phone looks like an absolute joke after 5 minutes. If you look at videos of it from social media influencers, you can clearly see how it's basically a LineageOS clone with apps like "Freedom Store" (Aurora Store) included. It's not at all good for privacy.
(I'm sure if I went back to look at reviews of the Freedom Phone, I could point out another 10 open-source projects they blatantly copied and slapped their own name onto.)
On the point of social media influencers, I remember how one commentator asked if it was running iOS. This goes to show how much forethought and research went into the influencers' demos of this phone. IMO it casts a bad light over all of them (not that I saw them in a good light anyway).
That being said, it is quite curious how many people believed the marketing and bought the phone. It has to be said that not nearly enough overall research was done, and a lot of people suffered the consequences of that (and still don't realise to this day).
Pretty much all privacy advocates, right and left, meet in the middle with the cryptography mathematicians who broadly speaking are apolitical about maths, if nothing else.
Their common points being do not roll your own and publish and check everything in your protocol model and codebase
The eternal vigilance of checking your security model. It's a cost.
>It's ok, though, each upload has some sort of nominally unique identifier associated with it, so it's not trivial to just download other people's backups.
This part confuses me. If it matters who ends up with your backups that implies that the backups are not protected. Then wouldn't you be more concerned about access to your backups by the Freedom Phone people?
After scrolling, and scrolling, and scrolling some more ("is this literally peddling clairvoyance?") I finally encounter a... DNA test kit at the bottom of the page. Oh. So this is either the internet equivalent of overnight infomercial TV (oversell oversell oversell) or they actually are doing Weird Stuff to the DNA that gets sent in.
Going further and checking out https://www.clearhealth.coach/ClearTUNE.html, the latter does seem to be the case: they've apparently come up with the idea that DNA is "quantum-entangled" and that when you send your DNA swab off to their lab, exposing that DNA swab to frequency (how?) transmits supposed benefits back to you via a "quantum link".
Congratulations, you giant acorns, you've just provided all the raw material to enable some unfortunate numpty with us-vs-them syndrome to come along and "discover" the conspiracy of But What Are All The Other Testing Companies Doing To DNA They Might Be Transmitting Harmful Frequencies Making People Stupid???
Please stay a niche. Please stay a niche. Oh, good, it's $500, hopefully that prevents it from scaling.
*Headdesk*
The unhinged/unbounded nature of the way this has been presented sadly only serves to weaponize the impact of any reactive conspiracy theories: the claims this makes about purported benefits (there's a list just above the price section, which includes such humdingers as "EMF protection", "essential nutrition", "GMO detox", and "injury regeneration", along quite a few more) are entirely vacuous and without substance (understandable and par the course) - but if you flip this sort of non-closed-ended mindset around in a what-if setting, no amount of substantiation and concrete data will fill the sort of false information vacuum (for want of a better way to put it) that gets created.
(On a side note, it's curious how everything in the aforementioned list fits reasonably comfortably into "can be influenced by the placebo effect". The bit about "Covid Care" neatly sidesteps claiming significant effect too. Really gives me the impression this was definitely sniff-tested by a lawyer or two - whoops, there go several bits of plausible deniability out the window...)
Poking around the little web of shell^Winterconnected organizations this setup has cobbled together, I noticed:
- MLM identified at https://www.clearcellular.org/ - down the bottom, "reward yourself": "...a robust rewards program for those who refer their friends and family."
- They really do appear to have registered co.com to get clear.co.com, but despite co.com having an A record the IP times out, nice
- After drowning in the word "decentralized" everywhere on all the cryptocurrency fluff, https://clearfoundation.co.nz/webwallet obtusely notes front-and-center that "This password encrypts your private key. This does not act as a seed to generate your keys." ...k
- Clicking around between different websites I cannot straightforwardly figure out what any of them do. Yes there are PDFs and value propositions and case studies and interconnections but there's so much information it's overwhelming and I cannot see straight. Oh. That's the strategy. Wait where did all my money go??? ...What business overheads? Consulting? Consulting for what? What have I actually gotten out of this?
I was wondering if HPE even realized what they were associating with. I now wouldn't be surprised if they don't realize themselves.
> - They really do appear to have registered co.com to get clear.co.com, but despite co.com having an A record the IP times out, nice
They didn't register co.com; someone else did and is running it as a "domain registry". That's a whole scam of its own, if you ask me. https://registry.co.com/
It only gets weirder the more you look. ClearGlass (next icon over) is some pretty wild cloud technobabble (it's described simultaneously as a "secure and scalable hybrid Blockchain platform" and a "single dashboard to manage multi-cloud infrastructure"), and the ClearShare website (which looks like a rebranded FileCoin, or something similar) links to a PDF describing a battery-powered generator called "ClearPOWER".
A lot of the web sites look like they were made from templates. Some of them even still have Lorem Ipsum text on them.
Somehow with multiple comments about how embarrassing the phones association with republican organizations is, no one seems to be talking about how they backup your messaging data in a possibly insecure way and exposing peoples email address if you have an associated phone number.
Surely I can't be the only one who finds it incredibly frustrating to see how many people think being republican associated is noteworthy when in the context of scary privacy violations. It would seem to me you're just encouraging republicans to buy this phone. Surely, the privacy conscious people in this community want privacy for everyone regardless of political affiliations, right?
>Surely I can't be the only one who finds it incredibly frustrating to see how many people think being republican associated is noteworthy when in the context of scary privacy violations.
I think the point of the conversation is that this is a bad privacy product that is being heavily marketed towards (technically) unsophisticated people who subscribe to a specific brand of politics. Those two facts aren't unrelated. In other words: conservatives are the intended victim here, not the butt of anyone's joke.
I haven’t seen any comments encouraging anyone to buy this phone.
If you take making fun of the phone and the people dumb/gullible enough to buy the phone, “encouraging republicans to buy this phone,” well, I don’t know what to tell you. If someone is so full of spite for the evil leftists that they’ll run to anything some of those users make fun of, that’s on them.
But no one thus far has encouraged anyone to buy this piece of shit product.
> * Somehow with multiple comments about how embarrassing the phones association with republican organizations is, no one seems to be talking about how they backup your messaging data in a possibly insecure way and exposing peoples email address if you have an associated phone number.*
> Surely I can't be the only one who finds it incredibly frustrating to see how many people think being republican associated is noteworthy when in the context of scary privacy violations. It would seem to me you're just encouraging republicans to buy this phone. Surely, the privacy conscious people in this community want privacy for everyone regardless of political affiliations, right?
It's frustrating when people unnecessarily politicize things— like when they express righteous indignation over their inaccurate accusation of political discrimination in a thread that's literally just pointing out its association with divisive partisan political groups.
The problem here is that "Freedom" in "FreedomPhone" does not seem to be "freedom" the way free software advocates define it, or privacy advocates define it; it seems to be "freedom" the way far-right activists use it as a dogwhistle. If people are a bit focused on the company's politics, it's because they put those politics front and center.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that if there was some company doing the inverse of this -- marketing to the segment of the far left that believes tech companies are, if not explicitly conservative, explicitly uber-capitalist and willing to pander to conservatives at every turn to prove how "centrist" they are[1] -- and was doing the same thing that the FreedomPhone is, then the discussion on HN would be pretty similar: we'd be going, "Hey, this looks like it's basically a rebranded phone with dubious software that's being marketed to people with a political chip on their shoulder." The flavor of the chip isn't irrelevant, but it's not what's specifically curious and scammy about it.[2]
[1]: I am sure there are conservatives who are reading this and scoffing at the idea that leftists think social media companies are biased against them. All I can say is that I probably follow more leftists than you do, then, and you're gonna have to trust me on this one.
[2]: There is an interesting and weird history of marketing scams that specifically target conservatives, and evidence that there's more of that on the right than the left (although by no means is it exclusively right-leaning).
Look, I’m resigned to the fact that most of the leadership and investors in most of the companies I support are voting red. It’s in their self-interest, and the majority of them are highly ranking members of the church of self-interest; acolytes of the reverend Milton Friedman. Many of the open source projects I love most for their utility and verve are built by libertarians who aren’t very amenable to paying for social safeguards. Needless to say, my political and economic views skew elsewhere. Regardless of that, I’m going to support their services and projects on their own merits, and according to my needs and those that I perceive in others.
This is different. The Freedom Phone is another cash grab against some of the most vulnerable people in my country. Their susceptibility to manipulation has been laid bare and the wolves of the world have picked them over again and again. This is targeting marketing it is most cynical conclusions. The formula is well known: Push a high margin product and service to an addressable group. Speak to their fears and with their in-group language. Tell them exactly what they want to hear and make them scared to death to do anything but buy it. It matters not what substance is behind the product. In fact, in schemes like these, actually delivering real value is antithetical to the point: to become rich, by way of filth.
I’m not politically aligned with the group that is being targeted for The Freedom Phone. In fact, they as a group have repeatedly gone out of their way to hurt people that I care about. That said, they are people just like me and don’t deserve to be defrauded. This post did an excellent job of demonstrating how they are being lied to and that makes me mad as hell.
Based on the way they treat security and compliance from what we can see on the front end, I shudder to think what it is like on the backend. Unencrypted PII+payment methods, sloppy secrets, resale and abuse of customer data are all on the table, possibly more. The thing about these kinds of schemes is that they are almost never sustainable. Technical, social, legal, and/or financial debt will eventually cause their implosion. It’s just a matter of how many people they screw over in the process.
I’m going to spend part of my Easter Sunday sending this blog post and my thoughts to the FTC and some attorneys general. I would encourage you to do the same if you’re able and so inclined. Getting this in front of media is also valuable. Exploitation of this variety is cancerous and fully deserves to called out early and often.
Indeed. When I clicked on the thread I expected more serious technical analysis of the bad security. I could get "lol stupid suckers with victim mentality" pretty much everywhere else on the internet. Fortunately at least some of the more egregious comments have since been edited.
When a bunch of the comments are about how stupid the target demographic is, when there's tons of interesting technical meat to talk about, it's kind of embarrassing.
> Somehow with multiple comments about how embarrassing the phones association with republican organizations is
As of this writing, no comments exist that match that description. One comment mentions that it's a phone marketed at conservatives, but does not describe that association as embarassing.
This certainly isn't the first example of a sketchy/deceptive product targeted at a conservative audience, and it won't be the last...
Grifters have found an easy target in leveraging outrage & persecution fetish, and for all their bluster - their privacy & security practices are typically laughable at best.
Since you can't trust any company, and you're not going to build your own device from first principles, best to avoid mobile devices alltogether. Get an old pre-owned Nokia for phone calls and use laptop-based messaging if you need it.
I wrote a messaging app based on one-time pad encryption but ended up not using it due to poor-quality random numbers available to me (you can buy external random devices but I don't trust any vendor).
Always remember Leidner's First Law: "Security is an illusion."
We live in 2022. Eschewing modern inventions and "returning to the wilderness" is a rhetorical cop out.
The problem has nothing to do with taking a "since you can't trust any company" approach is you avoid the reality of the situation -- which is that certain companies index lower than others.
The company making this phone seems a little dubious.
ceejayoz|3 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umidigi_A9
AureliusDreamer|3 years ago
brundolf|3 years ago
kwonkicker|3 years ago
breakfastduck|3 years ago
Why even bother? You can't seriously run a project like this, add a load of bloatware, and expect to be trusted.
Even that misjudgment is enough to understand that the people running this have no genuine interest in user privacy. Talk about undercutting your own reason for existing.
im_down_w_otp|3 years ago
fmajid|3 years ago
derevaunseraun|3 years ago
Really not a bad business idea on his part, just highly unethical. I'd imagine you could just send the factory a custom ROM for the device, provide them with custom branding, and have them ship to the buyer's doorstep at a $380 markup. No warehouse or investment necessary, just a store website and a bunch of marketing $$$
tentacleuno|3 years ago
(I'm sure if I went back to look at reviews of the Freedom Phone, I could point out another 10 open-source projects they blatantly copied and slapped their own name onto.)
On the point of social media influencers, I remember how one commentator asked if it was running iOS. This goes to show how much forethought and research went into the influencers' demos of this phone. IMO it casts a bad light over all of them (not that I saw them in a good light anyway).
That being said, it is quite curious how many people believed the marketing and bought the phone. It has to be said that not nearly enough overall research was done, and a lot of people suffered the consequences of that (and still don't realise to this day).
ggm|3 years ago
Their common points being do not roll your own and publish and check everything in your protocol model and codebase
The eternal vigilance of checking your security model. It's a cost.
h0l0cube|3 years ago
https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/105/
duxup|3 years ago
What is that supposed to be?
ceejayoz|3 years ago
can16358p|3 years ago
In other words: BS.
motohagiography|3 years ago
walterbell|3 years ago
upofadown|3 years ago
This part confuses me. If it matters who ends up with your backups that implies that the backups are not protected. Then wouldn't you be more concerned about access to your backups by the Freedom Phone people?
mike503|3 years ago
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0588/5385/1291/files/say-h...
mike503|3 years ago
mike503|3 years ago
Rererences 3G radios, but do any providers even support that anymore? No 5G mentioned. Of course. :p
r00tanon|3 years ago
exikyut|3 years ago
After scrolling, and scrolling, and scrolling some more ("is this literally peddling clairvoyance?") I finally encounter a... DNA test kit at the bottom of the page. Oh. So this is either the internet equivalent of overnight infomercial TV (oversell oversell oversell) or they actually are doing Weird Stuff to the DNA that gets sent in.
Going further and checking out https://www.clearhealth.coach/ClearTUNE.html, the latter does seem to be the case: they've apparently come up with the idea that DNA is "quantum-entangled" and that when you send your DNA swab off to their lab, exposing that DNA swab to frequency (how?) transmits supposed benefits back to you via a "quantum link".
Congratulations, you giant acorns, you've just provided all the raw material to enable some unfortunate numpty with us-vs-them syndrome to come along and "discover" the conspiracy of But What Are All The Other Testing Companies Doing To DNA They Might Be Transmitting Harmful Frequencies Making People Stupid???
Please stay a niche. Please stay a niche. Oh, good, it's $500, hopefully that prevents it from scaling.
*Headdesk*
The unhinged/unbounded nature of the way this has been presented sadly only serves to weaponize the impact of any reactive conspiracy theories: the claims this makes about purported benefits (there's a list just above the price section, which includes such humdingers as "EMF protection", "essential nutrition", "GMO detox", and "injury regeneration", along quite a few more) are entirely vacuous and without substance (understandable and par the course) - but if you flip this sort of non-closed-ended mindset around in a what-if setting, no amount of substantiation and concrete data will fill the sort of false information vacuum (for want of a better way to put it) that gets created.
(On a side note, it's curious how everything in the aforementioned list fits reasonably comfortably into "can be influenced by the placebo effect". The bit about "Covid Care" neatly sidesteps claiming significant effect too. Really gives me the impression this was definitely sniff-tested by a lawyer or two - whoops, there go several bits of plausible deniability out the window...)
Poking around the little web of shell^Winterconnected organizations this setup has cobbled together, I noticed:
- MLM identified at https://www.clearcellular.org/ - down the bottom, "reward yourself": "...a robust rewards program for those who refer their friends and family."
- The little "made in china" stock image at the bottom of https://clearfoundation.co.nz/ is cute
- They really do appear to have registered co.com to get clear.co.com, but despite co.com having an A record the IP times out, nice
- After drowning in the word "decentralized" everywhere on all the cryptocurrency fluff, https://clearfoundation.co.nz/webwallet obtusely notes front-and-center that "This password encrypts your private key. This does not act as a seed to generate your keys." ...k
- While poking around https://www.clear.co.com/clearcenter I was curious about the VM offeri--oh it was shut down. Why is it the 2nd callout?
- Clicking around between different websites I cannot straightforwardly figure out what any of them do. Yes there are PDFs and value propositions and case studies and interconnections but there's so much information it's overwhelming and I cannot see straight. Oh. That's the strategy. Wait where did all my money go??? ...What business overheads? Consulting? Consulting for what? What have I actually gotten out of this?
I was wondering if HPE even realized what they were associating with. I now wouldn't be surprised if they don't realize themselves.
duskwuff|3 years ago
They didn't register co.com; someone else did and is running it as a "domain registry". That's a whole scam of its own, if you ask me. https://registry.co.com/
> - While poking around https://www.clear.co.com/clearcenter I was curious about the VM offeri--oh it was shut down. Why is it the 2nd callout?
It only gets weirder the more you look. ClearGlass (next icon over) is some pretty wild cloud technobabble (it's described simultaneously as a "secure and scalable hybrid Blockchain platform" and a "single dashboard to manage multi-cloud infrastructure"), and the ClearShare website (which looks like a rebranded FileCoin, or something similar) links to a PDF describing a battery-powered generator called "ClearPOWER".
A lot of the web sites look like they were made from templates. Some of them even still have Lorem Ipsum text on them.
walterbell|3 years ago
summm|3 years ago
knorker|3 years ago
It's not a stretch to say that the whole Blockchain industry IS MLM.
gkop|3 years ago
lovemenot|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
toolz|3 years ago
Surely I can't be the only one who finds it incredibly frustrating to see how many people think being republican associated is noteworthy when in the context of scary privacy violations. It would seem to me you're just encouraging republicans to buy this phone. Surely, the privacy conscious people in this community want privacy for everyone regardless of political affiliations, right?
matthewdgreen|3 years ago
I think the point of the conversation is that this is a bad privacy product that is being heavily marketed towards (technically) unsophisticated people who subscribe to a specific brand of politics. Those two facts aren't unrelated. In other words: conservatives are the intended victim here, not the butt of anyone's joke.
filmgirlcw|3 years ago
If you take making fun of the phone and the people dumb/gullible enough to buy the phone, “encouraging republicans to buy this phone,” well, I don’t know what to tell you. If someone is so full of spite for the evil leftists that they’ll run to anything some of those users make fun of, that’s on them.
But no one thus far has encouraged anyone to buy this piece of shit product.
ElemenoPicuares|3 years ago
> Surely I can't be the only one who finds it incredibly frustrating to see how many people think being republican associated is noteworthy when in the context of scary privacy violations. It would seem to me you're just encouraging republicans to buy this phone. Surely, the privacy conscious people in this community want privacy for everyone regardless of political affiliations, right?
It's frustrating when people unnecessarily politicize things— like when they express righteous indignation over their inaccurate accusation of political discrimination in a thread that's literally just pointing out its association with divisive partisan political groups.
duxup|3 years ago
I think a phone associated with a specific political party is noteworthy.
ceejayoz|3 years ago
I don't see anyone in this thread doing this.
chipotle_coyote|3 years ago
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that if there was some company doing the inverse of this -- marketing to the segment of the far left that believes tech companies are, if not explicitly conservative, explicitly uber-capitalist and willing to pander to conservatives at every turn to prove how "centrist" they are[1] -- and was doing the same thing that the FreedomPhone is, then the discussion on HN would be pretty similar: we'd be going, "Hey, this looks like it's basically a rebranded phone with dubious software that's being marketed to people with a political chip on their shoulder." The flavor of the chip isn't irrelevant, but it's not what's specifically curious and scammy about it.[2]
[1]: I am sure there are conservatives who are reading this and scoffing at the idea that leftists think social media companies are biased against them. All I can say is that I probably follow more leftists than you do, then, and you're gonna have to trust me on this one.
[2]: There is an interesting and weird history of marketing scams that specifically target conservatives, and evidence that there's more of that on the right than the left (although by no means is it exclusively right-leaning).
reilly3000|3 years ago
This is different. The Freedom Phone is another cash grab against some of the most vulnerable people in my country. Their susceptibility to manipulation has been laid bare and the wolves of the world have picked them over again and again. This is targeting marketing it is most cynical conclusions. The formula is well known: Push a high margin product and service to an addressable group. Speak to their fears and with their in-group language. Tell them exactly what they want to hear and make them scared to death to do anything but buy it. It matters not what substance is behind the product. In fact, in schemes like these, actually delivering real value is antithetical to the point: to become rich, by way of filth.
I’m not politically aligned with the group that is being targeted for The Freedom Phone. In fact, they as a group have repeatedly gone out of their way to hurt people that I care about. That said, they are people just like me and don’t deserve to be defrauded. This post did an excellent job of demonstrating how they are being lied to and that makes me mad as hell.
Based on the way they treat security and compliance from what we can see on the front end, I shudder to think what it is like on the backend. Unencrypted PII+payment methods, sloppy secrets, resale and abuse of customer data are all on the table, possibly more. The thing about these kinds of schemes is that they are almost never sustainable. Technical, social, legal, and/or financial debt will eventually cause their implosion. It’s just a matter of how many people they screw over in the process.
I’m going to spend part of my Easter Sunday sending this blog post and my thoughts to the FTC and some attorneys general. I would encourage you to do the same if you’re able and so inclined. Getting this in front of media is also valuable. Exploitation of this variety is cancerous and fully deserves to called out early and often.
freedomben|3 years ago
When a bunch of the comments are about how stupid the target demographic is, when there's tons of interesting technical meat to talk about, it's kind of embarrassing.
loeg|3 years ago
As of this writing, no comments exist that match that description. One comment mentions that it's a phone marketed at conservatives, but does not describe that association as embarassing.
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
Casteil|3 years ago
Grifters have found an easy target in leveraging outrage & persecution fetish, and for all their bluster - their privacy & security practices are typically laughable at best.
iinnPP|3 years ago
I am concerned when privacy and freedom have somehow turned into a right wing signal.
hunterb123|3 years ago
[deleted]
Jason_Protell|3 years ago
https://www.freedomphone.com/
spaetzleesser|3 years ago
"Pre-Loaded Apps Some of the most popular banned & unbanned conservative sites & apps. Come pre-loaded directly on your Freedom phone."
It's basically "Conservative Phone"
actionablefiber|3 years ago
JKCalhoun|3 years ago
Proven|3 years ago
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jll29|3 years ago
I wrote a messaging app based on one-time pad encryption but ended up not using it due to poor-quality random numbers available to me (you can buy external random devices but I don't trust any vendor).
Always remember Leidner's First Law: "Security is an illusion."
yowlingcat|3 years ago
The problem has nothing to do with taking a "since you can't trust any company" approach is you avoid the reality of the situation -- which is that certain companies index lower than others.
The company making this phone seems a little dubious.