Vodafone unwraps anti-snooping app for businesses

[steven36]

Vodafone has launched a secure messaging app for privacy-minded companies.

The app, available to Vodafone's enterprise customers in Germany, is being touted as a way to prevent industrial espionage and snooping on corporate calls.

Vodafone will provide end-to-end encryption for calls made over the VoIP-based app, called Vodafone Secure Call. The app will work for both wi-fi and mobile calls carried over Edge, UMTS, or LTE networks, and will work both in Germany and abroad.

The app, which uses AES 128-bit encryption, is available for iOS and Android phones for a monthly fee of €14.95 per user. While Vodafone said last year that a Windows Phone app was also under development, for now Secure Call is only available for the two main smartphone platforms.

Companies can give their employees access to Secure Call if they're not on monthly contracts, and can also invite contractors or freelancers to use the service on a temporary basis.

The mobile app itself has been built by Secusmart, a German mobile security company bought by BlackBerry last year.

Vodafone and Secusmart first announced they were working on the app at last year's CeBIT trade fair. After 10 months of development work, the companies are pitching the product to "companies of all sizes".

Deutsche Telekom, Germany's largest telco, announced its own encryption product at CeBIT: an encryption app for mobile data and voice calls for businesses. Both Android and iOS versions of the product were released later that year.

Source