Follow
Just last week we saw how FBI Director, James B. Comey, said that companies such as Google and Apple are making it harder for the law enforcements agents to get information about users. His statement caused quite a stir online and now another piece of privacy-related news has come to our notice: it appears that Kickstarter cancels its plan to build anonymising router after questions were raised about the project.
Kickstarter Cancels Its Plan to Build Anonymising Router
Anonabox is a router which anonymizes its user. When the company sought $7,500 on Kickstarter, they were surprised to find that they had gotten $585,000 from people all over the world in the first week.
Unfortunately, Kickstarter cancels its plan to build anonymising router after many questions arose around the project. The main issue for concern that raised the most questions, was the security issue. The router works by connecting to a network, called the Tor network, which then bounces the data around the net and encrypts it at every step in order to stop all the attempts to trace who is visiting the website.
Until Anonabox was invented, people would use software to achieve this anonymization of data, but Anonabox said that hardware would do this infinitely better.
But there was another reason for concern about Anonabox: the fact that there were other devices in China that did exactly the same thing that Anonabox wants to do.
All this lead Kickstarter to suspend and cancel the project. Kickstarter is also making sure that the cash gets returned to the people who supported Anonabox. Kickstarter released an email in which is stated that the decision prompting them to take such a drastic measure were the questions raised online about who made the hardware and where it came from.
The man who came up with the idea for the Anonabox, August Germar, said that indeed, there were other Chinese products available on the market, but that they were simply just generic knockoffs and also that It doesn’t bother me. I just wanted more people to be able to have a device like this.
Germar said that even if Anonabox was cancelled on Kickstarter, they are planning to continue the development of the device and sell it directly to the people.
