Camden, NJ Native Continues Privacy Push With Latest Innovation
By Ian Bush
CAMDEN, N.J. (CBS) -- A Camden, NJ native is one of the creators of a smartphone that claims to keep the NSA out of your business.
The Blackphone looks like any other sleek Android device, but treats what you do on it differently.
"The number one priority in creating Blackphone is to uphold the objectives of privacy," says Phil Zimmermann (in top photo). "It's not to serve some other business model of monetizing customer data."
Zimmermann's company, Silent Circle, is partnering with Geeksphone on the hardware.
"I had to wait for the rest of the technology infrastructure to catch up, to make it possible to do good, secure telephony," he tells KYW Newsradio.
Zimmermann is the inventor of the PGP encryption method, widely used for e-mail and other data.
In the video announcing the device (at Blackphone.ch), Zimmermann is short on detail of just how it protects your privacy. But the site promises the phone will securely make and take calls, texts, video chats, and file transfers and "anonymize your activity" through a VPN (virtual private network).
We should learn more about Blackphone at next month's Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona.
