Camden Native Helps Create Privacy Protecting Smartphone
By Ian Bush
CAMDEN, N.J. (CBS) - A Camden native is one of the creators of a smartphone that promises 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. It's not to serve some other business model of monetizing customer data," said Phil Zimmermann whose 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 said.
Zimmerman is the creator of the widely-used PGP encryption for email and other data. In the video on Blackphone.ch announcing the device, he's short on detail of just how it protects 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.
We should learn more about Blackphone at next month's Mobile World Congress conference.
