The premise of essentially proxying customers into a major carrier in aggregate to preserve privacy is an interesting one.<p>I use such a service for home internet in Ottawa, Canada (<a href="https://ncf.ca" rel="nofollow">https://ncf.ca</a>) and it’s been working great - with much better customer service.
As a few others have pointed out I'm not sure I buy the privacy argument here (although there is very little to go on on the linked page..)<p>Having your phone radio on at all (even without a SIM, e.g. E911 calls) is inherently privacy violating. If you must have connectivity on the go, any prepaid SIM + always on VPN will do the trick. Use Twilio if you want multiple numbers.<p>$99/mo is ludicrous, even if this actually works, which I have doubts about given the history of purism.
we pay anywhere between $64-$80 a month (depending how many lines use over 2GB of data) for 3 lines of service on t-mobile that are unlimited all 3 ways (with the normal deprioritization that probably happens with this as well if going over 50GB a month, which we don't).<p>basically, I don't buy the significant value in their privacy mode (perhaps it has value to others, but not so much to me). I can see the value in supporting the development of the phone, but its a very significant delta in cost.
Is there anything more to it than a bit of billing indirection ? Hard to see any privacy benefits of that. How is it better than buying a prepaid sim ?
I don't understand, is this offer worldwide? Difficult to imaging this offer is valid for Belarus.<p>Or that only in San Marino (judging by the .sm domain)?
No technical details in the technical details section. Talks about privacy and then uses the least privacy-respecting carrier: AT&T? Ok cool, so the customer bill says Librem... when this gets piped to the NSA with the location data, I'm sure they can't handle putting a name to it. When it gets sold to location brokers with current location information, I'm sure it won't have the unique phone number tied to it. Might as well wave and put a target on your head saying "please de-anonymize me".<p>No clear definition of where deprioritization limits kick in or how it is to be enforced. Who cares though! The Librem 5 ships with a cat3 LTE modem. That is only <i>just</i> LTE on a single carrier, no LTE Advanced, no carrier aggregation. Forget talking about 5G, we don't even have a modem that supports full 4G operating speeds. Stop hyping something you aren't close to.<p>Now I get it, I'm sounding very harsh but understand that this is a company that's selling a packaged virtue signal (sorta like Virtu used to) and is consistently over-promising and under-delivering. Making phones is hard, making them in the US is next to impossible. I'd rather have a piece of working/shipping Chinesium (Pinephone) for a fifth of the price and use a sim card paid in cash from a prepaid carrier that I can load whatever to it and isn't going to be gone in a year, if I cared to attempt anonymity.
"Text, Calls, and Data are unlimited. Peak data users may be compressed to peak average"<p>What does this mean, exactly? At what point does "compression" kick in, and what does "compression" entail?
If I could do dual-SIM on one account for 99 bucks and get both AT&T and T-Mobile backends, that would be killer. The only thing more killer than that would be swapping one of them for Verizon.
This is probably off-topic but on a very broad level, from a privacy point of view I think it is important to separate 'service provider' (controlling the <i>instance</i> of your data) from 'software' developer / 'hardware' maker (controlling the <i>mechanisms</i> of your data privacy), no matter who and how open-source they are.<p>I'm not sure this instinct applies much to this situation, but it immediately came to mind. Vertical integration is where user privacy (from service providers) starts to erode.<p>Ideally, we should have competing but inter-operable service providers on common platforms and protocols which have nothing to do with the service providers.
Vaporware. Indefinitely on preorder, and $2,000:<p><a href="https://shop.puri.sm/shop/librem-5-usa" rel="nofollow">https://shop.puri.sm/shop/librem-5-usa</a>
pretty sure this'd be illegal in the EU where all simcard holders are required to tie the card to their ID documents by law, and there's a yearly checkup on these data
I appreciate free software and privacy, and it's cool to have a company that genuinely understands both of those.<p>But it hurts that Purism uses their monopoly over their niche to upcharge customers so much.<p>edit: I'm wrong. Didn't know about their financial woes.