Purism Planning For Three Hardware Kill Switches With The Librem 5

Purism has today shared some details on their planned hardware kill switches for the upcoming Librem 5 Linux smartphone.

Similar to their Librem laptops, Purism is planning for hardware kill switches on their inaugural privacy-minded smartphone and expect to have three switches. These three physical switches would disable cameras/microphone, WiFi/Bluetooth, and the cellular baseband.

Additionally, when all three hardware kill switches are activated, it also triggers a "lockdown" mode. The lockdown mode will also disable various sensors on the devices including GNSS (GPS), IMU, and ambient light / proximity sensors. The lockdown mode is also expected to be extensible to allow for other software-based behavior when all kill switches are flipped.

More details on the Purism blog.