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you think you’ve seen a scam before but wait until you see this one so just last week a 22 year old bitcoin millionaire called eric finman announced to the world the freedom phone a fully private smartphone completely free of censorship and snooping by the big tech companies like facebook and twitter and at the same time one that is supposedly comparable to the best smartphones on the market this thing flew it almost immediately hit the trending page and in terms of likes shares conversation people were passionately excited about it including some pretty well-known influencers who’ve basically been telling people to drop what they’re doing and to buy this right now so i did quite literally and paid 500 for a freedom phone and thanks to dashlane for sponsoring this video so this has got to be some next level smartphone right after all the last freedom phone we saw was oh right yeah anyways just to give you a bit of context eric’s reason for creating this phone was apparently inspired by the jan’s sixth riots in the us you might remember it donald trump lost the election and so a lot of his supporters stormed the capital building in washington dc to try and overturn that result now what made this whole thing even more controversial was that a lot of this writing had been coordinated on a free speech app called parlor and so after all this happened google and apple removed this app from their stores to discourage more people from joining in this was the pivot point eric’s whole message is that this was an unacceptable form of censorship and that people should be able to say the things they want to say and use the apps they want to use so he’s created a phone that allows him to do that okay i mean i can also see the other side of that coin but yeah just putting the political premise aside freedom itself is a fairly easy philosophy to get behind so let’s see what we’re working with here if you were an uninitiated consumer who didn’t really know much about phones but saw the inspirational twitter video and decided you want to buy are you actually getting more freedom well sort of maybe the entire pitch here rests on this supposed new operating system that he’s built aptly named freedom os it’s basically android but with a lot of the snooping apps like google chrome taken out and replaced with non-snooping alternatives like duckduckgo bit misleading that he’s pitching it like it’s some revolutionary software he’s built from scratch but we’ll let that slide then just to give the guy a little bit of credit he’s not wrong in that there are certain apps that google has censored that this phone’s app store called patreon patriarch will allow you to download and the kind of finishing message that he’s leaving people with is that freedom phone does everything your current phone does except sensor and spy on you this is where things start to go wrong i mean just to begin with we can’t verify that statement because we’ve got no idea what it does there’s not a single spec on the website you don’t know what processor you’re getting what cameras what battery and instead under each feature category it’s just a buy it now button like even if this is made for people who may not care about the specs for 500 they should at least be able to know what they’re paying for all we have is this little quote that says best phone in the world but who said that is this guy quoting himself also isn’t it just a little ironic given the whole anti-big text stance that this product was announced via a tweet and then the buy page actively encourages you to sign up to and share using these big tech platforms but okay just putting all that aside for a second the concept of freedom os is fine it’s just from everything we can see so far it looks almost identical to an already existing free piece of software called lineage os that would be a best case scenario see this finman guys had a pretty interesting story he basically made a deal with his parents that if he could turn one thousand dollars into one million dollars via investments they would let him skip college and he did he put all of that thousand he had into bitcoin back when bitcoin was worth nothing and when that blew up his thousand ballooned into well over two million that’s all well and good congratulations to him but the point is it doesn’t in any way qualify him to be responsible for all of your data he might be a little more reputable than one or two ceos i know but seriously if this guy actually has built his own operating system like he’s claiming then that is a whole other security risk in of itself let alone the fact that can you really rely on eric finman to provide you with the regular security updates your phone needs to protect itself and if you’re not getting those updates then having a completely unfiltered app store where nothing is censored even if it’s malware could create more problems than it solves this is probably the reason for articles like this this bit harsh but the point stands that nothing this guy has done so far in his career demonstrates that he is in any way an authority on security let alone the fact that who knows what kind of support you’re gonna get here there’s no contact number for the company and the only email address doesn’t answer or at least has left me on red for three days straight besides this whole idea of giving people the option to use apps that have been banned it’s not a selling point if i wanted to download parlor on my android phone even though i can’t find it on the google play store all i’d need to do is to rock up to the parlor website and just get it from there for free then even this patreon app store itself we can see from these celebrity endorsement videos what the interface looks like and that’s enough to all but confirm that all this store is is a re-badged version of an already existing free app and if you are enjoying this video then a sub to the channel would be invaluable didn’t see that one coming did you oh yeah and let’s talk about the celebrity endorsement videos actually because as soon as this phone was announced we saw a whole load of high-profile people drop videos that basically said this is the best thing since sliced bread we had candice owens who’s an american author who said freedom phone literally i’m holding a phone that is not controlled apple google i think this is like the most amazing thing ever yes candice so am i you need to get this phone i don’t know candice need is a pretty strong word i need food i need water i probably don’t need an unknown inspect 500 not drip or phone and clearly neither do you this girl spent a good minute talking about how easy it is to switch her sim over and how it’s the first thing she did from her iphone and yet her tweets after this video are still coming from an iphone oh yeah and how could i forget you can get 10 off um by using just my first name candace if you use the code candace if you if you use the code candace at checkout there are plenty more of these endorsement videos but probably the funniest one is from a girl called anna kate it’s literally 30 minutes of pure gold i kind of wish i could show you the whole thing but i’ll settle for highlights for starters she has no idea what it is it’s it’s an android i don’t think it’s an android is it an android i’m not really sure well set there is no face recognition which i love what’s next it doesn’t make calls which i love face recognition is a useful feature if you don’t like it you can always turn it off so i like that it very much reminds me of an apple phone it’s an android oh yeah and don’t forget if you want to get it use code kate you’ll get 10 offs it doesn’t take long to figure out why these people are involved turns out the freedom phone company has set up an affiliate scheme that pays promoters 50 per sale which means that let’s say i made a video telling you to drop what you’re doing right now and buy it and let’s say 20 000 of you actually went through and placed an order that would be one million dollars but this is the worst bit so far all we’ve gathered is that all the phone’s main selling points aren’t really selling points but this is where it goes from bad product to scan see this is an america first phone right this thing’s entire angle is that your data is yours get away from spyware etc even the logo is based on a us flag except it’s actually built by a small phone company in china the one country that donald trump who’s almost like the supposed inspiration for this phone accused of spying the guy even went as far as to completely ban chinese huawei for this exact reason finland’s justification was that well it’s impossible to build a phone top to bottom in the us right now citing the fact that motorola struggled with this exact same thing hey maybe that would be an issue if you know you actually built this phone yourself but it gets worse in an interview with daily beast he let loose that the company he was working with was in fact umidigi known for their shockingly low cost and absolutely not their reputation for security oh and would you look at that umidigi already has a phone that looks exactly like yours the a9 pro the notch is the same the buttons are the same the camera layout exactly the same these are not two different phones so what you actually mean when you say you worked with umidigi is that you went onto alibaba and you ordered a thousand phones for a hundred dollars each i mean by this logic tim cook and i are best friends because i’ve been ordering his iphones for the last five years just to give you some perspective here while a company like samsung might make twenty percent profit per phone xiaomi might make ten percent or maybe even five percent this guy is out here trying to make a 500 markup by only adding features that you can already get for free the finman has tried to justify this 500 price tag by saying the phone features customized hardware and improved memory but we know what that really means he’s gone on to the store clicked this button and then clicked this button but what makes it even funnier is the fact that the umidigi a9 pro is not even one of the company’s current models it’s a phone from 2020 and the chipset inside of it the mediatek helio p60 has been known to be vulnerable to authentication bypass attacks this isn’t the product of someone who actually cares about privacy it’s a product of someone who’s trying to take advantage of people who aren’t as tech savvy and who just don’t realize that a the hardware inside is incredibly cheap and b that they can get all of these apps that are on here for free anyways it’s tricking people into thinking they’re buying a us-centric device when actually they might as well have just imported a phone from china and used all the extra money to feed their family for a month on the subject of dodgy online happenings this is dashlane an app whose entire goal is to make the internet easier so you’ve probably been told at some point that the internet is a dangerous place that you’re constantly at risk of being hacked and that you should make each of your account passwords not just different but also complex enough that they end up looking like this but who’s going to remember them that’s what dashlane’s for you can either use your fingerprint or your face id and dashlane will then be able to instantly autofill all your details onto any site and compared to using something like google chrome’s default autofill software one it’s faster because it works no matter which device you’re using i could be autofilling on google chrome on my mac but then pick up my iphone open safari and still have the same details ready to go and two it’s safer because instead of just remembering a password that you typed in dashlane can auto generate the best passwords for you so you can have every single one of your accounts completely locked down but at the same time the only thing you’ll ever need to access them is you if that sounds helpful then you can actually try dashlane for free on your first device by just going to dashlane.com boss then if you go through that link and then decide that you want to upgrade for premium you can get that for 50 off using the code boss to see the biggest nightmare tech fails click here or to see what i want apple to change on the next iphone click here my name is aaron this is mrs boss and i’ll catch you in the next one
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