Is a ‘Made in America’ Smartphone Designed to Protect Users Too Good to Be True?
In a land of 330 million people, 280 million Americans own a smartphone. Not surprisingly, smartphones are by far the most popular digital devices in our lives. We spend inordinate amounts of time on our phones, scrolling, swiping, and searching for information.
Which begs the question: where was your smartphone made? Probably in China. This is problematic on so many levels.
Five of the 10 most popular phone brands in the world are Chinese: Huawei, Lenovo, LG, Oppo, and Xiaomi. Chinese phones are synonymous with affordability. They are also synonymous with spying.
For example, the cameras on phones manufactured by Vivo, a Chinese multinational technology company headquartered in Guangdong, a coastal province located in southeast China, have secretly recorded users’ activities and stolen their data. In addition to Vivo, other phone makers—like Oppo, Xiaomi, and Gionee—have been accused of harvesting users’ data and passwords.
Many Chinese-made phones come with apps like TikTok and WeChat already installed. Some phones, rather disturbingly, automatically download these apps, as well as other Beijing-backed Trojan horses.
According to credible reports, these apps excel at siphoning off copious amounts of information about their users, including “data that has nothing to do with the actual function of the app and for whose collection there is no reasonable justification,” Deutsche Welle (DW) reported in 2020.
In other words, these are malware apps masquerading as something much more benign.
Some Chinese phones come with preinstalled spyware, allowing God knows who to follow a user’s every move. In 2020, Alcatel, a smartphone manufactured by Telephone Communication Limited (TCL), a Chinese electronics company, was implicated in a huge spyware operation.
Alcatel phones, it must be noted, are readily available in major U.S. stores. Some of the other phones mentioned above might not be in your local Walmart, but they are easily purchased on sites like Amazon.
Of course, in this world of apparently unlimited choice, one doesn’t have to buy a Chinese phone. Plenty of other options exist. But the fact that communist China controls so much of the phone market should concern us all.
What if there was a “Made in America” phone, one truly capable of competing with the array of “Made in China” phones?
A Welcome Alternative
Some 30 years ago, it was common for U.S. companies to manufacture their phones at home. Alas, those days are long gone. Apple, one of the most popular brands in the world, now manufactures the vast majority of its phones in China, where cheap labor and violations of workers’ rights reign supreme.
In Zhengzhou, home to Apple’s biggest iPhone factory, employees are reportedly beaten and berated. Apple may very well be a global tech leader, but it’s not exactly a U.S. company that screams decency.
Similarly, Google, another U.S. tech giant that appears to lack a moral compass, manufactures many of its phones in China (although, in recent times, the company has moved more of its production to Vietnam). Apple and Google are two of the country’s biggest companies. Still, when it comes to the actual manufacturing of their wildly-popular products, there’s very little, if anything, American about them.
All hope, however, is not lost. When it comes to the manufacturing of smartphones, one company has opted to shun the Far East in favor of the United States.
Purism, a San Francisco-based company founded by Todd Weaver, specializes in producing electronics, including stylish smartphones. One model, the Librem 5 USA, is the only smartphone in the world displaying the increasingly rare “Made in USA” stamp.
This is not an advertisement for Purism. I am neither a spokesperson for the company nor endorsing any of its products.
In truth, I only discovered the company a few weeks ago. But what’s wrong with shedding some light on a company that appears to care about making decent products catered to the American public?
Unlike Apple and Google (and almost every other extremely profitable corporation in existence), Purism is a social-purpose company. In other words, it strives to put social good above profits. This, perhaps, explains why Purism’s phones are built around the idea of preserving a user’s privacy rather than violating it.
According to its website, whenever you pick up your phone and search for a term online, “you’re being controlled” by a market only too eager to use your “operating system and applications to collect as much information about you as possible.”
To make matters worse, this “exploited information” is then traded between various companies. Purism’s phones, we’re told, prevent such violations from occurring. All the source code is available for public consumption.
Moreover, as the site notes, users “can be sure there will be no secret backdoors, no unauthorized information being sent across the Internet, no need to register and be controlled by a company, no licenses to agree to.”
Will Purism ever be able to compete with giants like Apple or Oppo? Of course, not. But that’s not the point. Some things, like respecting users’ privacy, are considerably more important than accumulating hefty profits.
See more here theepochtimes.com
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Tom
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This phone has been around for a few years and I believe it features a Linux based operating system. It was very expensive considering the alternatives. This is a good idea, but I am not so sure that the service providers (ATT, Verizon, etc) are not getting in on the spying.
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Howdy
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Try the duckduckgo privacy app Tom. I have it on desktop and phone.
https://duckduckgo.com/app
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Carbon Bigfoot
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Hey Tom life goes on without S-Phones.. I have an old Samsung that I only use for emergencies when I drive my daily errands Never access the net or purchase anything. If I want to take pictures I have two reliable Sony Camera/ Camcorders.
Even then I carry it in a Faraday Bag and it is turned off. .
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Howdy
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“We spend inordinate amounts of time on our phones, scrolling, swiping, and searching for information.”
This is a group known as the ‘assimilated’.
Personally, I use my phone because it’s a phone and I can make calls on it. My computer is my ‘device’ of choice.
“where was your smartphone made? Probably in China. This is problematic on so many levels.”
Give it a rest will you. Stop tarnishing a nation, and all within it because of perception that they are the bad guys. The rest of the world is white as snow then I presume? Every body who cared to look knows that is nonsense. Phones have been intercepted during shipping and changed by people other than the manufacturer. Who takes the hit…
You know, every time you start an app that was killed, it will attempt to send all the data it can about your phone preferences, headphone use, volume, etc. The data is sold. Isn’t that theft without your permission? Stealing your data allowance for purposes not even remotely connected to the true function of the app itself. YOU pay for them to make money.
“Purism, a San Francisco-based company ”
USA based implies no privacy and your data subject to scrutiny by anyone from the govt down. Open source means nothing in this case.
One of the reasons duckduckgo is frowned on by some is because it’s USA based. It does the job for me. 60 blocked attempts at tracking from an app on startup…
Google have repeatedly tried to shift the goalposts on this. Only one VPN since, android 6 was it? odd that It didn’t show up until the last 12 months then. Now Google store has to be bypassed or it doesn’t work properly, Yet worked fine for years. WiFi app now has to have location enabled, yet didn’t for years, even though the app requested it. Now it won’t work without.
I think that’ll do for now.
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gerald brennan
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“Purism is a social-purpose company. In other words, it strives to put social good above profits.”
Nonsense. They see a niche for a money-making product. The social good aspect is likely true but let’s keep things in perspective.
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Typhus
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The social concern leads its ads, likely as virtue signaling to git yet budness…all for nice fat profits. As they laughingly strip the rubes.
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