Look, I’m resigned to the fact that most of the leadership and investors in most of the companies I support are voting red. It’s in their self-interest, and the majority of them are highly ranking members of the church of self-interest; acolytes of the reverend Milton Friedman. Many of the open source projects I love most for their utility and verve are built by libertarians who aren’t very amenable to paying for social safeguards. Needless to say, my political and economic views skew elsewhere. Regardless of that, I’m going to support their services and projects on their own merits, and according to my needs and those that I perceive in others.
This is different. The Freedom Phone is another cash grab against some of the most vulnerable people in my country. Their susceptibility to manipulation has been laid bare and the wolves of the world have picked them over again and again. This is targeting marketing it is most cynical conclusions. The formula is well known: Push a high margin product and service to an addressable group. Speak to their fears and with their in-group language. Tell them exactly what they want to hear and make them scared to death to do anything but buy it. It matters not what substance is behind the product. In fact, in schemes like these, actually delivering real value is antithetical to the point: to become rich, by way of filth.
I’m not politically aligned with the group that is being targeted for The Freedom Phone. In fact, they as a group have repeatedly gone out of their way to hurt people that I care about. That said, they are people just like me and don’t deserve to be defrauded. This post did an excellent job of demonstrating how they are being lied to and that makes me mad as hell.
Based on the way they treat security and compliance from what we can see on the front end, I shudder to think what it is like on the backend. Unencrypted PII+payment methods, sloppy secrets, resale and abuse of customer data are all on the table, possibly more. The thing about these kinds of schemes is that they are almost never sustainable. Technical, social, legal, and/or financial debt will eventually cause their implosion. It’s just a matter of how many people they screw over in the process.
I’m going to spend part of my Easter Sunday sending this blog post and my thoughts to the FTC and some attorneys general. I would encourage you to do the same if you’re able and so inclined. Getting this in front of media is also valuable. Exploitation of this variety is cancerous and fully deserves to called out early and often.