Purism Announces the Librem One Online Privacy Respecting Suite

• Purism launches a crowdfunding campaign for a complete online privacy suite.
• The bundle will launch with four apps, a chat applet, a VPN service, an Email client, and a social media network.
• The cost of the subscription is set at $7.99/month, or $71.91/year, and there need to be at least 5000 subscribers for the service to launch.

Purism has announced the “Librem One”, a bundle of online apps that feature end-to-end encryption on all services that they offer, respect users’ privacy, and follow secure practices across their entire operational spectrum. The first four products that are comprised in Librem One include the “Librem Mail”, which is an email client supporting the OpenPGP signature standard, the “Librem Tunnel”, a VPN solution based on the OpenVPN, the “Librem Social” social media that uses the ActivityPub decentralized social networking protocol, and the “Librem Chat”, which is based on the XMPP and the Matrix protocols.

Purism is a California-based company that was founded in 2014 with the premise and goal to give users privacy options that did not exist in the market at that time. They have developed their own privacy-focused operation system based on Debian Linux called “PureOS”, while they are also selling two laptops, dubbed Librem 13 and Librem 15 which are geared towards privacy and security. These laptops are offering physical hardware switches for the cameras and microphones, and contain almost no proprietary software tools that are beyond the team’s control. Finally, Purism markets the “Librem Key”, a USB security token used for two-step verification, and using 2096-bit RSA and 512-bit ECC keys.

As a company, Purism always looks to extend its product range and expand their reach to the people and offering them a complete privacy-respecting solution is an imperative requirement. Librem One was created in this context, as users of PureOS and Librem laptops need to have their online experience complemented by coherent and equally trusty tools. However, this doesn’t mean that to use the Librem One suite you will have to be using PureOS.

All that you’ll need is to pay the subscription of $7.99/month, or $71.91/year, and you’ll gain access to the four products of the suite, as well as all of the additional tools that will be launched in the near future, enriching the bundle. Examples of tools that are to come later include “Librem Files” (end-to-end encrypted cloud storage), “Librem Pay” (cryptographic payments), and Librem Backups (encrypted cloud backups). However, Purism is a small company with limited resources, and developing all of the above without serving ads to users and without user tracking and data sales is hard. For this reason, Purism has set a crowdfunding goal of 5000 subscribers before they launch Librem One, and they are currently at 30% of their goal with two months to go.

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