Mitigating the Alarming Extent of Publicly Accessible Personal Data through Global Integrity's Qphone

The Ontic Protective Intelligence Podcast

Bill Marlow is an internationally recognized authority on Information Security and Risk. As an active participant in critical infrastructure protection on a worldwide basis, he has worked closely with global governments and law enforcement as well as financial institutions, energy corporations, pharmaceutical companies, and insurance companies on issues involving cyber terrorism, security plans, and international cooperation. Additionally, Marlow has served his country as a member of the Intelligence Community.

Key topics of Marlow’s discussion with host Fred Burton include:

• The critical security need behind protecting publicly accessible location data for executives and their corporations, as well as individuals who are deployed abroad.
• The technology and strategy that went into creating the Qphone and the importance of the right customer base for this product.
• What’s next in the world of privacy and protection.

Key takeaways:

01:19: Bill Marlow: My team and I have been looking at things to help the good guys. The bad guys have the highest end capabilities that you can imagine - spectrum radios, point to point encryption capabilities - the good guys on the other hand are not exactly well funded.

The Qphone is an ultra secure communications app that you can put on virtually any mobile device to allow fully secured, fully protected communications. The critical part is that we collect no data. We don't know where you are. We don't care where you are. We don't know what your phone is. It is truly a clean implementation. The encryption we use is a Quantum resistant encryption using the latest techniques to prevent Quantum computers from actually accessing it.

02:46 Fred: Wow, that's simply amazing. Now I think most of us who have lived in the intelligence space or the protection business are used to apps such as Signal or Whatsapp and so forth. How is Q phone different?

03:04 Bill Marlow: So nothing in life is free as the old adage goes. As you’re using a free app they have to pay for themselves somehow. So what they do is they collect information or metadata on every individual and then correlate that information and sell it lots of places. More importantly, there are a number of agencies around the world from different governments who buy that information through third party companies. They collect things about where you are, what kind of device you have, who you are connected to and how many times you talk to them, so on.

The Qphone, on the other hand, doesn't collect anything. Now, it's not free but we don't collect anything so you're protected from that kind of analysis from going on. To most of us who are in the intelligence business or even the law enforcement business, that's a critical item - not having people be able to tell where you are who you're talking to or what you've done.

13:51 Fred: And I assume ah like most businesses do there's due diligence on customers to make sure that this technology is not falling into enemy's hands so to speak.

14:02 Bill Marlow: Absolutely. In fact, that's one of the critical items for us is that you have to be a recognizable organization. You have to be a corporation. You have to be a law enforcement group.

17:46 Fred: When you think through this having done a lot of threat assessments and vulnerability assessments on ultra high net worth individuals and so forth, you might have a CEO that's very secure but family members and children aren't.

18:01 Bill Marlow: Exactly and they're the vulnerability.

18:04.75 Fred: So in this space with a Qphone if you had this deployed amongst your core family and so forth. You could rest assured that nobody's tracking you monitoring you and triangulating in on your location.

19:23.56 Bill Marlow: I think that more people need to be made aware of all the things that are happening to them in a privacy mode. How much information is being gathered about them people don't realize the extent of the information that is being gathered every time they go out to a news site or they go shopping online or and they don't have the right kinds of protections in place.

19:58 Bill Marlow: Qphone is one piece of a security program. We can protect their communications. We can make sure that they can send documents and messages and they can have conference calls and video calls securely. It works on your your mobile devices. It works on your desktop. But that’s a piece of a much larger program. There’s a need for people to start understanding about the amount of information that's being taken from them.