Updated: Mozilla, Deutsche Telekom won’t release “privacy phone”

Privacy, eye, data

Update: Mozilla has told TechCrunch that the WSJ’s framing of this as a partnership around an actual phone was inaccurate. In other words, there’s absolutely no news here beyond the more general Firefox OS collaboration that we reported on one year ago to the day. For the record, I did contact Mozilla’s representatives to seek comment before publishing my original piece, but received no reply.

That original story follows thusly:

A year back, Deutsche Telekom and Mozilla said they were working together on privacy-centric features for Firefox OS, including “location blurring” (fine-grained control of how much location information to give to each app), guest mode, and a registration-free “find my phone” tool. It looks like that collaboration is about to bear fruit: According to a Wall Street Journal piece on Tuesday, the companies will unveil a “privacy phone” at the upcoming Mobile World Congress that will include such features. The article also notes how the T-Mobile parent and other German carriers are lobbying against the last-minute watering-down of strict new EU data protection rules that will cover web service providers such as Google and Facebook.

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Tuesday, March 10, 2015
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