Patriot Phones is a personal project of mine, started in 2020. It actually started much earlier than that as I have been playing around with custom phones for some time. However, 2020 woke me up to the need for a secure phone. In the past, I knew big tech was collecting data but they were more concerned with personal privacy than a political agenda. When Contact Tracing was automatically included in a recent update I decided to cut the cord and start actively working on finding a solution that made my privacy a primary focus. If you don’t know already all of the major phone companies are not concerned with protecting your data and are actively involved in selling your data. I won’t go into details now and will include a blog posting on this in the future.
Finding the right secure phone has been a process. I’ve tried many different types of phones and operating systems to get where I am today. I initially wanted to be completely off of anything Apple, Google, or Microsoft-related, so I tried a Linux-based solution called SailFish OS. This solution was really amazing but it was hard to make it my daily driver as it lacked many of the Android tools that I was familiar with. I also ran into an issue with the phone’s support of Voice of LTE, which will make the phone unusable in the US market if not added in the near future. After much research and development, I have landed on a secure operating system (GrapheneOS) that is based on Android but includes security features beyond what is found on off-the-shelf phones.
Security isn’t convenient. When I started out looking for a secure phone my focus was on privacy. However, to use a phone as my daily phone it had to work for me. This is often referred to as a daily driver. So now that I had a secure phone I had to shift my focus from privacy to usability. It took a few months but I was able to find solutions for many of my common activities and still keep the phone secure. After many months of work, and the hard work of many others such as Daniel Micay, I am happy to present Patriot Phones secure phones and service. Thank you for taking the time to read about my journey, which hopefully will be the start for yours.
George Washintin