There is a strange phone booth floating in the void of the internet. Lacquered red in the British style, it sits in space. If you click it, it will initiate a free 45 minute encrypted video call. It looks like a Zoom call, but unlike Zoom, it’s completely private. This is theinternetphonebooth.com, a website that routes users to Birdcalls, a privacy-centered communications service.
“Isn’t there something essential about the phone booth in society? Public, yet private? A little space to connect with someone, in the middle of a crowd? Maybe a better question to ask would be: how did the internet exist without its own phone booth before now?” Sunny Allen, the founder of Birdcalls told Motherboard.
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Birdcalls is available as a separate service, but the phone booth proves the concept to new users who might be unfamiliar with end-to-end encryption, which ensures that communications are only sent directly between two parties and can’t be decoded by eavesdroppers.
“There’s a lot of friction points to the signup process for Birdcalls,” Allen said. “We force you to write down and store a 24-word passphrase that encrypts your password, and then there’s a lot of different options for how you want to set up your calls. It’s overwhelming for someone who just wants to try out the service for the first time. So we wanted to design a one button press website that just throws you into a call. Then we were like, shouldn’t this website be visually interesting too? That was the day The Internet Phone Booth presented itself to us from the latent space.”
Like many of us, Allen spent a lot of time on Zoom calls during the pandemic. That’s when she noticed something strange about them. “I started seeing whispers of a pain point online, one that no one else seemed to be paying attention to,” she said. “That was the lack of control over screenshot blocking while video calling. The rest of Birdcalls as a privacy-focused company fell into place around that.”
Birdcalls creates a single-use video call using end-to-end encryption. The rooms last for 45 minutes and have built-in screenshot and call recording blocks.
“We collect the minimum amount of data necessary to keep the wheels on the bus,” Allen said. “We have no idea how many unique individuals have used the Internet Phone Booth. Or er, Phone Booths plural, actually. We have a few secret other phone booths spread throughout the internet, and across all of them we’ve logged just over a thousand calls with over 100,000 participant minutes spoken. But we can’t tell you who they were or anything that was said, because we have no idea ourselves. As it should be. Private spaces should remain private.”
Over the summer, Zoom faced a backlash after it updated its TOS to say it would train AI using data from the calls it facilitated. After numerous high profile groups like Bellingcat announced they’d stop using the service, Zoom tweaked the TOS to clarify that it would not train AI without users opting in.
“I think we’re mostly numb right now to the personal privacy violations that most internet companies are thrusting onto us. We just see it as a necessary evil,” Allen said.
She said she thinks the next wave of the internet will be one that’s privacy-focused. She sees DuckDuckGo becoming a significant competitor to Google, and Protonmail leaching users from Gmail. She thinks that’ll work for most normal people who just want a little more privacy. But she also knows there’s always going to be people who are very vocal about needing to be anonymous.
“Maybe it goes back to the early days of the internet, when nobody knew you were a dog,” she said. “Now there’s this group of hardcore hacker-esque netizens, and part of their cultural affiliation with each other is that they still have the technological chops to maintain their anonymous dog status even thirty years into the internet. And so they go to great lengths to show how good they are at it.”
Of course, someone could always use a camera to take an image or recording of a video call using the Birdcalls. “I’m a privacy pragmatist and not a privacy idealist, so it doesn’t matter to me that it’s not a perfect offering,” Allen said. ”When it comes to screenshot blocking, raising the barriers for bad actors is enough to satisfy the needs of regular people.”
“The core problem right now is that people don’t even realize that taking a screenshot is a breach of trust. It’s like putting a lock on a door: someone can still pick the lock and get in your house, but because the lock was there, it’ll be obvious to everyone that they weren’t supposed to break in. And because the vast majority of people do respect locks, we sleep easier in our homes,” she said. “Screenshot blocking makes It easier to relax into the ephemerality of your private everyday conversations on the internet, just as private as your conversations would be in your physical home.”
Allen said that when you use normal video call services, it’s like ignoring the person who’s peeking into your home. “When you’re in your house at night, and you think about the possibility that there’s a person standing in the grass in your backyard, physically peering into your bedroom window and staring at you changing—the mere idea of that makes your skin crawl.”
“At Birdcalls, we put some shades on your windows and a lock on your door,” she added. “It’s just the right way to communicate on the internet.”
