The smartphones in our hands are more powerful than a supercomputer from the eighties; they are becoming smarter, faster and popular. But being faster and smarter doesn’t necessarily means that the smartphones are also secure. Sure there are many smartphone companies that do work on their security and introduce new features to protect the end user.
But there are not many that can offer what the Russian cybersecurity group InfoWatch, run by Kaspersky Lab’s co-founder, is offering: Taiga Phone, which gives you the power to have complete control over all of the information that enters and gets out of the device.
Taiga Phone's makers claim the phone is a benchmark of security for its users as it guarantees complete confidentiality including protecting the user's location data, files, images, calendar events and prevents applications like Gmail (known for reading emails so it can provide its users with targeted advertisement) from collecting and leaking information.
Bloomberg reports:
"The Taiga phone, designed by Moscow-based InfoWatch Group and named after desolated forests in Siberia, runs its own Android-based firmware that lets apps run on the device but stops them from collecting data. The phone also has a built-in agent that gives the administrator — such as a corporate IT department — control over what apps will work on the device and what content the user can access or share."
“Most smartphones apps collect certain data on users and send it to outside servers. When people use personal phones at work, their corporate emails, documents and job-related photos come under threat of being – maliciously or accidentally – leaked to third parties,” said leading IT entrepreneur and Kaspersky Lab’s co-founder Natalya Kaspersky.
This heavy-on-security smartphone is in its final stages of production. According to Komando, the phone is expected to cost fewer than 15,000 Rubles, which makes it under $280.
For now, we are unsure whether this device will make it to the United States because president Donald Trump recently put a ban on all Kaspersky products because they are considered to be helping the Russian intelligence and are deemed a threat to the national security, which the company denies.
Will Taiga Phone be ever sold in the United States, we don’t know. But the phone promises to provide enhanced security to its users. Given that how people keep almost all of the important data on a phone, features that are present in Taiga Phone will be required in almost all of the phones.
https://twitter.com/anondos_/status/954029661947805697
- anondos_