Welcome to Cybersecurity Insights, the podcast for the CyberEd.io learning community. Our goal is to bring cybersecurity practitioners the latest and most relevant education and training to upskill and dive deeper into topics that matter in today's modern cybersecurity world. Good day, everyone. This is Steve King.
I'm the managing director at CyberEd.io. With me today is David Sinclair, who's the CEO and founder of ForFreedom. David will give us a little background on himself and how he came about to put ForFreedom together and what his passion is about. This is a play on business that focuses on privacy and mobile and device security.
But I'll let David tell us about that. So welcome, David. Thank you for joining us today. So give us, if you can, a little background on yourself and tell us a little bit about ForFreedom, and then we can talk about some of the issues.
So I spent most of the last 30 years living and working in countries primarily in Eastern Europe, Middle East, Africa, a little bit in South Asia. Most of that time was spent managing the implementation operation of complex IT systems for government agencies and large companies, a lot of that working together with mobile operators as well as government agencies that wanted to integrate with mobile operators to implement systems to surveil people through their mobile phones. So helping mobile companies as well as government agencies to track people's location, their communications, listen in on their conversations, that sort of thing, and collect their data from the mobile phones. Yeah, so maybe you're one of the guys that started this whole surveillance society, huh?
Well, you know, we have a philosophy in the countries we're working at, primarily developing markets or emerging markets. And so we had a philosophy called copy with pride. We didn't invent anything. We always copied systems that had been implemented elsewhere and implemented them.
So I wouldn't say that I'm so much one of the people who started the surveillance society, but I was for a long time somebody who helped contribute to it. That's for sure. Yeah, I'm, of course, have been just here, but only have. So when did you start For Freedom?
So I moved back to the U.S. in 2019. 2019, I came back to the U.S. and I've lived in a lot of countries where let's say they're not the most democratic countries in the world, given that I was a foreigner working on projects around security and surveillance and things like that.
I was very often being surveilled myself, whether that was physically being followed or having my email hacked or having my conversations listened into because they were concerned, hey, this guy is a spy that's implementing these systems for us. Right. I was very excited to come back to the U.S. in 2019 and say, I'm finally I'm back in the land of the free.
And I was shocked when I got here to discover that I'm actually surveilled more in the U.S. than I ever was when I lived in Kazakhstan or Russia or Saudi Arabia or any of those places. And, you know, it dawned on me then that most of the technologies that I was implementing in these countries were actually invented here. And so, you know, really, America, for all of its push for freedoms and everything like that, is actually where the idea of the surveillance society really began.
Yes, certainly. And, you know, the folks that would there are plenty of folks that would argue that, you know, it's OK to surveil if you're one of the one of the folks that know what they're doing. Right. You know, the reason you have the freedoms you have, David, is not because of the Constitution, but rather it's because of the smart individuals at the top of the pyramid who are who are creating this environment for you.
And we got to pay a little attention to what you're doing every day or so. But, yeah, that's OK. No harm, no foul. Right.
I'll tell you, after I got back here and realized how much I was surveilled, I started speaking with a lot of people. And what I discovered is that just about everybody I talked to was kind of concerned about the fact that they don't have a lot of privacy. The problem is nobody knows what to do about it. And so really, I said, you know, there's got to be something that we can do.
And that was really what motivated me to start researching the topic and start trying to figure out, is there a way to implement a technology solution to this problem to help give people back their privacy? And that's really what led me to developing the For Freedom platform. It took me about two years to develop it. It began kind of as a hobby and became a passion.
And last year we launched it as a business. And so for a little over a year now, we've had For Freedom mobile, which our whole focus is helping people to secure their mobile phones, stop the tracking, the hacking and the data collection that goes on every day. Yeah. And the reason for that, you know, going back to your point, is that this whole concept of freedom is very dependent on individuals.
You know, even the Constitution doesn't really guarantee us any kind of rights to privacy. If you look at the way the Supreme Court has interpreted the Fourth Amendment over the years, you know, the Fourth Amendment is supposed to protect us from unlawful search and seizure, but it's limited only to unlawful search of your home, unlawful search of your written letters. So they don't consider email to be the same thing as letters, for example. The Supreme Court doesn't because email is actually provided by some service provider.
And you agree in your terms and conditions with that service provider that the service provider can have access to your messages. And so the same thing is true with your voice conversations on the phone or your text messages. They don't consider that to be private communication under the Constitution. So there really are no protections for our privacy when we're using our mobile phone in the U.S.
today. And when you look outside of the U.S., it's, of course, far worse than it is in the U.S. in terms of the lack of protections of our privacy. Yeah.
So so are your customers retail consumer kind of customers or do you sell to the enterprise as well? So we launched last year focused on consumer because we wanted to make sure we got it right in the consumer space before we started trying to sell into businesses. This year, we're actually trying to expand our business by selling into businesses, looking at business customers who are concerned about the security of their mobile devices. You know, and I'll give you a good example.
The U.S. Department of Defense has identified securing their employees, meaning soldiers, sailors, airmen, et cetera, mobile devices as one of their top three critical cybersecurity issues to address this year. And the reason for that is very simple. The Department of Defense, just like most businesses, has a bring your own device policy.
And because they have that bring your own device policy, they have no control over what's going on to those devices. At the same time, company's employees do a massive amount of business on their mobile phones, whether that's checking their email or that's sending text messages or making phone calls. There's a massive amount of company confidential information that's collected by your phone, even your location. You know, if you're a sales guy and you're making a call on a client, you don't want your competition to know who you're calling on or when you're calling on them, when you're meeting them there.
But that information is so easy to collect from a mobile phone these days, whether that be something as complicated as putting malware or spyware into that phone to collect and send that data back. Or it's something as simple as I can go out on the Internet today or you can go out on the Internet today, find a website where you can enter a phone number. And for 19 bucks a month, you can track the location of that phone number 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You know, it's just an amazing amount of data that is getting collected and that is openly available through data brokers and others that are making that data available to anyone and everyone who wants it.
Yeah. And I have long, I've been in the space quite a while. I've been a long, longstanding opponent of BYOD. And that has got me in lots of disfavor with a lot of folks.
But, you know, you're either serious about this stuff or you're not kind of. And, you know, while I want to create a work environment that's conducive to my troops and make sure that, you know, life is easy, as possible and convenient and all the rest of it. At the same time, why would I do a self-inflicted vulnerability the size of BYOD vulnerability? It's just crazy to me.
So I've been an advocate of corporate owned devices ever since this debate began. But that has not been the winning argument. And you're right. I mean, we have this huge, huge vulnerability.
So is that kind of your strife target for entering negotiations with businesses and so forth? Absolutely. So, you know, our focus is really those companies that want to have a bring your own device policy, but want to figure out a way to keep those devices as secure as possible. Right.
You know, there are some companies that say bring your own device, but we're going to control what apps you can put onto it. That doesn't work for a lot of people. Right. There's other people that say, oh, bring your own device, but we're going to put this piece of software on your device that's gonna allow us to know everything you're doing on it.
And again, there's a lot of people that are employees that don't like that approach. Right. The approach that we're taking is a little bit different. What we're focused on doing is helping people to secure their device, secure their communications, prevent anyone from being able to collect that data from their device so that all that data stays on the device.
That's and see the use case. And there are many, many, many of those. So, you know, we're spending a lot of time, a lot of, you know, brain time trying to figure out what the best way to communicate all that is. But in the case of your clients with, you know, what you alluded to earlier, most of this data, most of this privacy issue has already been violated so many times.
I don't think that, I mean, I can't imagine that I have any more privacy, any more information that is of use to anybody, seeing as how I've been, you know, happily handing it over to Google and Apple and everybody else and their brother for years and years and years. Yes and no. You know, you raised the subject of IP and the intellectual property risk, and we as technology people often think of the importance of IP. I actually think the low-hanging fruit in terms of what's the highest risk near term due to this type of data collection and now the ability to apply AI by anybody to analyze these types of data sets is actually not technology intellectual property.
It's commercially confidential information, whether that be your company's financial status, because you've got somebody who's looking at their financials or doing some financial work on their phone, or if the company's sales and business development efforts, you know, who are you selling to? What's your proposal? What's your price? What's your offering to that customer?
These types of things are very, very open to somebody getting that data through data brokers, gathering that type of information. Yeah, isn't that kind of the old-school data, though, also? I mean, this has been going on for a while. I mean, I can read anybody's 10K, 8K, what have you, right?
Easily enough. There's that. So, it's... Well, how do investors make money, though?
Big-time investors make money by knowing what the company's results are going to be before they report them, right? You know, you want to know what your competition's bids are before they become public, right? So, very simple example, right? I used to bid on government contracts.
If I knew what my competitor's bids were before they were made public, I could submit my bid and make it more competitive. You know, so there's a lot of ability to do what we would traditionally think of as corporate espionage. It's now actually data that's accessible. It's no longer...
You don't have to try real hard to go out and get it, to get this kind of information. You know, we used to, I remember years ago when I was a sales guy and we had our CRM systems, there was a lot of concern around who had visibility to which client inside the corporate CRM system, because you didn't want anybody and everybody in the company being able to see, you know, the company's top 20 clients and all the detailed conversations and discussions and sales opportunities that were going on in those clients. You had to limit the access to that information heavily inside the CRM and who had access to which accounts, right? But a lot of that, you know, is going away.
If you can just monitor somebody's locations on a sales guy's location, you know exactly what clients he's calling on, right? And you know how often he calls on them. And you can monitor his phone calls, you can know how often he's called them, who is he calling at the client, right? Who are his supporters?
Who are the people he doesn't contact? You know, that's an enormous amount of information that's very valuable as a sales person competing against somebody to know how that person is engaging with your client. So, your pitch to these guys is you can keep your BYOD, but here's a way to make sure that, you know, you're completely secure. I would never use the word complete, but yes, here's a way to help make your BYOD devices more secure.
You know, I think saying something is completely secure, I don't think that's even a true possibility anymore. But the idea is to make it so difficult to access that information that it becomes not worth it for somebody who's trying to access it, right? So that's the goal. So what we do is we actually are a replacement for your AT&T or T-Mobile or Verizon.
We are a mobile service provider. We use the network of the large operators. So we have agreements in place with 800 network operators around the world. So in the U.S., we use the towers of AT&T and T-Mobile, but we have our own secure core network implemented, using an app on your device to make all your phone calls and send all your messages with our system.
And our app is not like a Signal or WhatsApp where you can only talk to people who are users of that app. You can actually call any number or send a message to anybody using our app. But what we do is when your phone registers on the network, it doesn't share any of your information with the network. So your average AT&T SIM card, when it registers on the network, it says, Hi, I'm Steve King.
Here's my phone number. Here's my home address. And then AT&T will use that information as a starting point to then collect all of your data against you, your location, all that sort of thing. When our SIM cards register on the network, it says, Hi, I'm a SIM card.
Here's the resources I'm supposed to have access to. It doesn't provide any of the user's personal information. And so it actually appears to the network as though it were just a dumb machine. You know, it's like the IoT or machine-to-machine SIM cards, right?
They just register on the network. There's no phone number associated with it. Therefore, the network treats it as a dumb machine-to-machine SIM card. And so they don't bother tracking things like location and all that sort of thing.
All of our phone calls and messages and everything are done through software, not through the telco network. And so we're able to ensure that the network operator, you know, they don't know your identity. They don't know your phone number. They could, if they knew your ICCID, your SIM card ID, they could track your location.
But because of the way the SIM card registers on the network, they just receive it as just being another dumb machine-to-machine SIM card. So they don't bother tracking the location on it. And then they're not able to track your communication because we're not using the standard telco operator-provided voice and SMS technology. We're using a software-based system that uses our app and our secure core network to handle all the calls and messages.
And then everything is encrypted because it's all done through our app, right? And we also provide an app to encrypt everybody's internet activity and their app usage. We're actually launching, I think it's actually later this week, ahead of the 4th of July, Ball State Social Media, which will allow you, instead of having the Facebook app on your phone collecting tons of data, it'll actually allow you to access Facebook from your phone while preventing Facebook from collecting any data from your phone. So the day the Facebook app is just a vacuum of data.
It collects massive amounts of data from your phone, location, contact, all kinds of other information. We make it so that you can use Facebook's social media platform without having to have their app on your device. And so they're unable to actually collect data from your device. That's true for every social media platform?
Yeah, absolutely. It's designed. We have several social media platforms pre-installed on it, and then it has a feature where you can actually add additional platforms. So we figured, you know, as new platforms come out or maybe there's some unique platform in your industry or in your country, you'll be able to add that yourself to this Stay Social Media app.
That's pretty cool. Speaking of Facebook, you know, Cambridge Analytica upset a lot of people for a while back then. And I find it, you know, interesting that I think there's four survivor companies from Cambridge nobody seems to care about. But they're doing exactly the same thing that Cambridge was doing back then.
What's to, to your earlier point about the, we're not sure who's doing what in terms of influence, cyber influence operations anymore. You know, whether it's the Russians or our own Central Intelligence Agency. What, how do we, what's to prevent that from happening at scale? Nothing.
Quite bluntly, it happens. I am a firm believer that the big tech companies are one of the biggest threats to democracy today because Google has over 90% of the searches that happen on the internet today. People at Google have the ability to influence the results that you get. And they do intentionally influence the results that you get.
I'm not saying they do it for political reasons, but they do it for business reasons. You know, Google, Facebook, the same way. These companies are built on an advertising model, which means it's all about driving engagement, driving eyeballs on the screen. They ran experiments and they published the results of these experiments back from like 2008 to about 2014.
They were regularly publishing the results of experiments they were running showing that when they showed people things that made them happy, you know, rainbows and butterflies, people lost interest. They got offline. When they showed things that made people upset, that created fear, uncertainty, doubt, that drove engagement. And so they have a vested interest in finding issues that are going to cause you fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
And so, you know, these companies have a vested interest in, I believe, in driving the fragmentation of society and putting groups against one another. And, and it's just, it's because that's their commercial model, right? It's driving eyeballs on the screen. And they do that by driving these fears, uncertainty, and doubt.
And so to do that, I believe that's part of the reason why our society is so politically fragmented today is because right, and those are the people that I'm targeting, right? I think businesses have a valid reason to be concerned about the security of their BYOD devices, right? I think that there's a lot of individuals out there that have a valid reason to be concerned about the security of their devices, their communications, that sort of thing, right? I think everybody has a valid reason.
I think that there are a lot of people out there who perceive this as being important enough that they want to do something about it. And what we try to do is make it easy, right? So, you know, our starting plan for unlimited talk text and high-speed data is that, you know, $29.99 a month. And so for what is a relatively cheap price, you can get similar quality service, which you would get with an AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, and at the same time, it's secure.
We're a mobile service provider. I will tell you, we've had college students using us as their home internet service provider because they could then, you know, play games and watch movies without having to pay for it. But, you know, most people want to have a higher speed internet service provider than what they can get through LTE or even 5G these days. So, but, you know, for mobile service though, you know, we're a valid alternative in terms of quality.
You know, we have the same coverage as AT&T and T-Mobile combined. So we actually have better coverage than, you know, Verizon or AT&T or T-Mobile alone because we actually have access to two networks. And oh yeah, by the way, for those people who travel, we have free international roaming built into that. So you get free international roaming in over 200 countries around the world built into that.
In addition to that, though, you know, in addition to that great coverage and the great quality services you get, we also provide all the security features that we've been talking about where we prevent people from being able to track your location, your identity, your communications, your internet activity, your app usage, your financial transactions, and now your social media usage. You know, we're providing all of these benefits at a price, the same or less than what most people are paying for their mobile service today. Yeah, I know, sure. That's a heck of a deal.
So I'm aware that we're at the top of the bottom of our hour here. So I want to wrap up, David, is what are your plans for the future kind of the next 12 months? Do you have any product upgrades or changes that you're planning on making or just business as usual here trying to build a larger customer base? So we're constantly evolving our portfolio of offerings.
I mentioned we're launching both ahead of the 4th of July, the Safe Social Media app. We have another app that we'll be launching shortly that's really focused on stopping malware and spyware on people's mobile phones. Frankly, as I mentioned before, I don't see that as a bigger problem, but it is kind of another space we want to cover. The other thing is, you know, last year, we launched our own secure mobile phone.
So for people who do want to do BYOD in the business environment or who do not want to do BYOD in the business environment, or for just individuals who want to have a mobile phone that's more secure than an Apple or an Android phone, we launched our own secure mobile phone last year. And later this year, we're actually planning on launching a second generation of that phone. What is that price? So our standard secure mobile phone today is priced at $699.
And that's about where we're probably going to price the next generation phone when it comes out as well. It's about $699. What we found is that's a reasonable price for people to pay, right? It's around the same that they would pay for a Samsung or an Apple, but it has the advantage of being secure.
You know, it's based on the Android operating system, which means they can use all their favorite apps. But what we've done is de-Google it completely. So it no longer shares any information with Google at all. And so it's a secure phone, but at the same time, unlike most secure phones, you can download Spotify and use it on there, right?
You can download your favorite apps to use them. And the camera quality is similar to the current releases from Apple. Absolutely. So, you know, our current phone has a 48 megapixel camera.
So it's very similar to what people get today from the latest and greatest phones. The next generation phone that we're launching towards the end of the year, probably around the Christmas time, is going to have an even better set of cameras and actually a better screen as well. So, but, you know, it's a small, lightweight phone, you know, relatively small, I should say, right? It's not an iPhone 7, but it's a relatively small, easy to use phone, lightweight with great quality and most importantly, it's secure.
You're not sharing your data with Apple or Google or other people. That's great. Well, good luck with that, David. And I'm sure, I'm sure you'll have a terrific year.
And I appreciate you joining us today. It was a fascinating discussion and it's a fascinating topic. I'm sure we'll have lots to talk about as time goes on here. So thank you again for joining us.
Thank you, Steve, for having me. And I just want to mention real quick, our website in case people want to get more information. It's 4freedommobile.com. That's 4, like the number 4, freedommobile.com.
Thanks a lot, Steve, for letting me on your show. Sure. Thank you. And thanks to our audience for spending another half hour or so with us today.
I hope this information was useful and interesting, and it's a domain that's going to get a lot of attention here as generative AI sort of picks up speed around that space and we're in an election cycle. So can't wait. Take care, everybody. Until next time, I'm your host, Steve King, signing off.
Thank you for joining us for another episode of Cybersecurity Insights. You can connect with us on LinkedIn or Facebook or send us an email at [email protected]. For more information about the podcast, visit cybered.io forward slash podcast. Until next week, stay safe and secure, and we'll see you on the next episode of Cybersecurity Insights.