Yesh
I'm a gun owning conservative that this phone was targeted towards, as its original name was to be the "Red Pill Phone". I totally agree with you that liberals in this country hate on rich people (because they want everyone financially equal); hate on gun owners (partially because they have no training with firearms so they afraid); and hate on conservatives (for so many reasons because they don't see the same things we do).
This phone has a closed source version of Android, which means that you or I or anyone will never know exactly what the code on your phone is doing in the background as NO ONE can look at that code. You'd most likely get sued for reverse engineering any of this company's code to show any suspicious activities they were doing. Reverse engineering means taking their raw code, learning what it does, and then sharing anything malicious with the public.
Great, he may be 800% American - who knows really? I search around about him & then find references to provide to shine the light on the things he has done in the past (or allegedly) which don't paint a pretty picture. I would encourage you to provide some references too. I'd be very curious to hear about the good things he may have done.
Regardless, the main focus of this post is if what he's selling is what he says he's selling or not. There are too many products advertised to deliver promises that are impossible, touted as "the most secure" or "the most private" phone, and this sets off many RED FLAGS regarding their marketing facade.
When it comes to phones, as others have said, don't use one if your threat model is too high. That's not realistic for most people, so then that brings us to three different options - Apple Crap, Android & variants, or Mobile Linux (which is under a lot of development still, but has hope in the near future).
1. Apple is a surveillance company and using their products is just putting your data into this company's surveillance network. Furthermore, these phones have been cracked and broken into. This can even be seen from the
2. Android & variants - Google is a surveillance company too. If you use an unmodified Android phone, then you are definitely putting your data into this company's surveillance network. There are alternative versions of Android which provide different types of protections, and most of them are open source which means that anyone can view their source code and see what the code is actually doing on their phone.
2.a. One open source Android variant is called
LineageOS, and running this can protect your data from specific adversaries. You can keep your data from the G00g if you do not install their Play Store or Play Services on your phone. Instead you can install free & open source applications from the F-Droid store, which again are applications that you can see all their source code. This variant will work on a lot of different phone models, which can be found on their website.
2.b. The version of Android shipped with Erik's Unplugged Phone is called LibertOS, which their company will tell you is a proprietary operating system. As I responded above to @kennyg , which btw I love the forum name - keep playing that sax, closed source code creates issues because there is no way to know what the code is actually doing on or with your device.
2.c. IMHO, and as others have stated earlier in this thread, there is an Android variant called
GrapheneOS (GOS). By default GOS does not come with any G00gle Play Store or Play Services or any of their spyware apps installed. GOS is completely open source so you can go & look at the code that is running on your phone to see what it is doing. You also get the advantage of a full phone encryption via the Titan hardware chip in the phone, whereas many other phones only provide a software-based full phone encryption, which is much weaker. By design, if anyone were to tamper with your GOS phone, then it would just flash back to factory default and they would not be able to get your data. I also recently learned that GOS has a feature where you can setup a "Duress" PIN or Password on GrapheneOS , as seen in
this YouTube video. I've never seen any other phone offer that feature.
3. Linux on Mobile is coming along. The PinePhone is very hobbyist, but it can work. Other users posted in this thread about the Librem phones, which I have not used yet.
And this is a perfect example showing the dangers of using closed source software on your phone. Unfortunately with Apple you do not have any choice other than to switch to a different platform.