Blackphone's top executive talks up his privacy phone

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — As CEO of SGP Technologies, the company behind the privacy-oriented Blackphone, Toby Weir-Jones believes our personal information is valuable and worth safeguarding. He spoke to USA TODAY's Ed Baig about who should consider the Blackphone and why. Comments have been edited for space and clarity.

Q: Who is the ideal Blackphone customer?

A: Generally they're working professionals, travelers, government employees but maybe not at the highest levels in the military. They're very interested in doing the right thing, and they may have been given some guidance by their employer or family or friends saying this is something (privacy and security) that you should pay attention to.

Q: What has the impact been of the Edward Snowden/NSA business?

A: All of a sudden there was this dramatic increase in awareness, and people were saying, "Well, I had no idea." (It) got a huge amount of mainstream media play. And rightly so. "Bulk surveillance" became a phrase that is actually familiar to a lot of people. And while people may not have a detailed understanding of exactly how you might (get compromised), what they suddenly realized was that their information had ceased to be in their exclusive control a long time ago.

Q: So how mainstream can Blackphone become?

A: It's all very well if you want to post to social media or share information, but you should do so only on your terms, at your discretion. And you shouldn't allow service providers to take that privacy away from you because it's buried in page 800 of an EULA (end-user license agreement) you're never going to read. Folks would prefer not to carry two phones, but a lot of people still do. We don't have access to the Google Play store on the phone — so we know in certain cases there are going to be users who say, "This isn't going to work in my off hours, because I want to get my phone to be able to make movie recommendations." There are ways to address it. For example it's easy to add the Amazon store to the phone. You can get Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, a whole bunch of stuff. That's the path of least resistance.

Q: How are Blackphone users protected?

A: They are no longer giving away their vital statistics: their demographics, location, browsing habits, purchasing habits. The services that you historically perceived that you got for free are very well developed; they work well; there's a high level of feature content. The reality is that the commercial incentive to improve those products and make them available is because of the information that those developers get in return. You, as a participant in the system, with money in your pockets and habits and family and friends and work and all those other things — that sensitive information is valuable.

I'm not saying you should never (take advantage of those services). What I'm unhappy about is the insidious nature by which more and more of your personal information is taken from you, often without any forthright disclosure. Because that (leads to) the creation of a surveillance state. The difference here is that it's tolerated by the government but actually propagated by private enterprise.