[conspire] Fw: The Freedom Phone is not great at privacy

[Rick Moen]

Further context about what "Freedom Phone" is:
https://www.xda-developers.com/freedom-phone-overpriced-smartphone/

  It’s not every day that a new smartphone company pops up, claiming to
  offer a device that protects your “freedom of speech” from Big Tech. So,
  when Erik Finman, a self-proclaimed “Bitcoin millionaire,” announced the
  Freedom Phone yesterday, it piqued our interest. Finman claims that the
  Freedom Phone is “the first major pushback on Big Tech companies that
  attacked us [American conservatives],” and it features an “uncensorable
  app store” that will offer all the apps that have been banned on
  mainstream app stores. But is the phone actually all that Finman claims
  it to be? Let’s find out.

Two things the MAGA crowd are, speaking in broad terms, really good at
are (1) projection, and (2) scamming the MAGA crowd.  Anyway, the core
idea of this product is alleged counterstrike against Big Tech.  Freedom
Phone creator Erik Finman cited, in the product announcement, Twitter's
2020 ban of former US President Дональд Дж. Трамп from the service as 
inspiration for the doohickey.  (AFAIK not specifically cited, but
motivating, was Google, Inc.'s removal of the "Parler app" for Android
from Google Play Store on the day of the Jan. 6, 2020 US Capitol riot
for "incit[ing] ongoing violence in the U.S.")

Thus, the implication is Freedom Phone will help facilitate the
much-desired parallel world of social media for Трамп cult members.

  [...] the phone works with all US domestic and international carriers,
  comes with pre-loaded conservative sites and apps, and runs a
  “free-speech first operating system” called FreedomOS (not to be
  confused with the custom ROM [link] with the same name) that 
  features a privacy tool called “Trust.” The phone is priced at [US] $499, 
  and thanks to the company’s generous affiliate program [link], many
  right-wing personalities and influencers in the US are hyping it up.

  If alarm bells are already ringing for you, then good, because it gets
  better from here. In an interview with The Daily Beast, Finman confirmed
  [link] that the Freedom Phone was manufactured by Umidigi — a Chinese
  smartphone brand headquartered in Shenzhen. In fact, the phone appears
  to be identical to the Umidigi A9 Pro, which currently costs just
  $179.99 on Amazon.

{snicker}

  A hands-on video [link] of the Freedom Phone from right-leaning 
  personality Candace Owens reveals that the so-called 
  “uncensorable app store” seems to be a rebadged Aurora Store.

And article explains further that Aurora Store is just an open source
API to reach Google Play Store -- and thus, the claim that the phone's
app source cannot be "censored" (e.g., by Google is)... um, I'll pick my
words carefully, here..., at best recklessly incorrect.

Article goes on to say that "FreedomOS" is likewise kind-of a Potemkin
village in that in essence it's just LineageOS, the mainstrem successor
to CyanogenMod, i.e., bog-standard community-maintained Android with 
nothing special.  And thus, it appears to be just a People's Republic of
China, Shenzen-produced Umidigi A9 Android phone with an insultingly
thin overlay of MAGA PR razzle-dazzle and a (nearly) tripled price tag.