The greatest extent to which a phone can protect your privacy is only allowing your physical location to be tracked . I don't think that can be called protecting your privacy at all. It seems downright irresponsible for them to be claiming their device does what no phone can do.
There is also a concern about the phone, like other smartphones, including a baseband processor that runs closed-source software and has access to the phone's memory. The baseband processor could be running malware without the main processor or the OS being aware of it. Hacker News had a good discussion of this when the Blackphone was posted there recently:
Your service provider can determine your location by multilateration, and your SIM uniquely identifies you. Consequently, this. Your cell phone can't avoid exposing you to location tracking, because being a cell phone requires exposing you to location tracking.
Pretty light on specs in this article, any idea how it compares to other phones on the market in this regard? If it's not as good as other phones people will have to make a trade off between privacy and capability. It will be interesting to see how that plays out. Edit: I checked the website: https://www.blackphone.ch/ and there's no specs or pricing there either.
This is the first I've heard of it so I'm only going off the information in the article. I'm still a firm believer that the apps are what make the phone. This seems like a custom Android OS so you should have access to standard apps. What I'm not sure of is how they control the data sent to individual apps. So, does this mean that all data in all apps are secured via VPN, including the phone and sms functionalities? Or will it vary? As I recently attempted to code an Android app, different versions of Android OS work differently with the hardware or firmware of the specific phone. For example, initialization of wifi hotspot varies so greatly between different phones AND phone manufactures AND different carriers of said phone. I wonder if the VPN will have any effect on the functionality and the user's ability to successful open and use the various apps....and anonymize all Blackphone activity through a VPN (Virtual Private Network).