PrivatUHARDENED MOBILE HARDWARE
LEGAL 05 — LAWFUL USE

Privacy is lawful. We sell to people exercising a right, not evading one.

Last updated
8 September 2026
Applies to
All enquiries and, when we open, all orders
Discretion
Ours, and final

01Our position

Encryption is legal. Owning a phone that does not report on you is legal. Choosing your own operating system is legal. None of that requires a justification, and we do not ask you for one.

What we do reserve is the right to decline a sale. We are not a common carrier and we are not obliged to build hardware for someone who tells us what they intend to do with it.

02Who we sell to

  • Legal counsel holding privileged client material.
  • Investigative journalists and their sources.
  • Executives and board members carrying commercially sensitive information.
  • People at risk from a specific individual — stalking, harassment, domestic violence.
  • Professionals with a statutory duty of confidentiality: medical, financial, legal.
  • Anyone who would simply rather not be the product. That is reason enough.

If your threat model is not on this list, tell us and we will say so plainly rather than guess.

03What we refuse

We decline the sale where an enquiry tells us the device is wanted to commit or conceal a crime, or to harm someone — and we will not resell to anyone passing our devices off as their own build. We do not need a catalogue of examples: if you tell us you intend to break the law, the answer is no.

A hardened phone is not a defence. It is a phone that does not volunteer.

It will not defeat lawful process, physical seizure, a compelled passphrase, or someone reading your screen over your shoulder. Anyone selling you a device on that promise is lying, and anyone buying one for that reason has bought the wrong thing.

04How we decide

We do not vet you. There is no background check, no identity verification beyond what payment and delivery require, and no questionnaire about your politics, profession or reasons.

We act on what you tell us. If an enquiry states an unlawful purpose, we decline it and refund any payment in full. That is the whole mechanism — we are not running an investigation, and we would be bad at it if we tried.

If we decline

You get your money back within five business days and a one-line reason. We do not report declined enquiries to anyone, keep a blocklist, or share names with other vendors.

05What we will not do

Some requests get a no regardless of who is asking, including when the request is lawful.

RequestAnswer
Install a backdoor, remote-access tool or monitoring agentNo
Ship a device configured to report to a third partyNo
Provision devices for someone to monitor without their knowledgeNo
Retain a copy of a customer key, passphrase or recovery materialNo
Under-declare a shipment or falsify customs paperworkNo
Confirm or deny whether a named person is a customerNo

The fourth one is worth reading twice. We hold nothing that could unlock your device, which means we cannot be persuaded, compelled or breached into producing it. That is a design decision, not a policy we could quietly change.

06Sanctions and destinations

We will not supply to a person or entity subject to Australian sanctions, or to a destination where importing the device or its encryption is unlawful.

07Why we publish this

Most vendors in this market either say nothing about who they sell to, or imply that lawlessness is the feature. Both are choices, and both attract a customer we do not want.

Saying it out loud costs us some sales and filters out enquiries we would have declined anyway. It also means our actual customers — the lawyer, the journalist, the woman being followed — are not standing in the same queue as someone shopping to break the law. That is worth more to us than the revenue.

If something here is unclear, ask us and we will say so plainly.

Write to hello@privatu.com.au, or reach us on Signal PrivatU.05 or Threema J7DX9S3A. We would rather answer a question before you order than argue about it after.