Back in February, John McAfee announced the developing privacy app project under the working title ‘Cognisant’ – with the release date of March 1st.  Delayed by refinement work and beta testing, the app has gone through a number of enhancements and a name change to D-Central1.  D-Central as you may recall is the anchor product that McAfee and his team at Future Tense are developing.  The Android app has been tagged with the final name of D-Central1, the first in a flagship series of security products by John McAfee.

One touch scans installed applications for permissions on your device that make your information vulnerable. – FutureTenseCentral

Here’s a little refresher, D-Central1 is a free to download app for Android mobile phones and tablets.  It protects those devices by empowering the user to be fully aware of all the permissions that applications have been granted on a device, knowingly or not.

McAfee stated at the time:

 “When it comes to these portable computing devices, we have these great big steel doors protecting a paper house, that’s why we’ve launched this product.  Endpoint protection, anti-virus, anti-malware, even encryption – all of those mean nothing if you have voluntarily given these applications access to everything” – John McAfee

Here is is his answer to that problem, a layer of choice and awareness that puts the user in control of their applications and what those applications do.

Here are some screenshots of the product:

McAfee’s team pushed one final alert dialog screen just today, and the release is ‘imminent’.  With everything else on the release checklist completed, by the time you read this post the application will most likely be available and published on the Google Play market.

I’ve used a couple of beta versions of the product and this final version, and it is an eye-opening experience, you are going to want to give it a try.

McAfee’s chief security technology guru Jim Zoromsky states:

The recent revelations of the present state of the art in personal communications technology seems to have acted as a kind of catalyst for innovation, the kind not seen for some time in the technology sector. Privacy technology is rapidly evolving, with barriers of access to true strong encryption technology clearing, and people awakening to a world where they are finding the need to manage their presence in a myriad of ways. Personal privacy seems to have been commoditized, and the only way to defend one’s own personal information is to become proactive about doing so. We are just beginning to enter the era of “timelessness” – when the state has the power to effectively replay your entire life back, filtered by their own criteria, for their own ends. Effectively recreating history as they see fit, a troubling proposition for some.

John McAfee seems to have an uncanny way to be a trend-spotter and -setter. He’s always thinking about what lies ahead, and we can expect his future products & services by FutureTense to continue to be innovative and revolutionary. He’s a real-life, nearly best-case test scenario for developing and implementing the most robust privacy and security products imaginable and we’re looking forward to helping him do just that.

Back to McAfee, back in February he shared more about this project, D-Central1 and the projects that are to follow:

“Info collection is everywhere and people have just assumed that all these apps are on the up and up – that’s a big problem.  When you ask yourself what a chat app is doing with built-in capabilities to silently make calls and put out other information, it’s a pretty dire picture.  It’s all about taking information, accessing your location, your camera and we’re losing our privacy.  There are many companies doing this, but that’s not the only threat, we’ve talked about the NSA but many governments are doing this as well.  There are persistent rumors and documented concerns about how much information is leaking to countries like China and Russia.  It would be surprising if they weren’t taking data at will at the highest levels possible right now, so why would it be any different for these applications.  There are also cybercriminals out there that live off of information they gather, it’s a big target.  When I launched McAfee Associates 27 years ago, the world of PC security was basically the Wild West and no one was really aware of the threat and the very real dangers we still deal with today.  We are in that exact same spot again.”

Update: there’s a bunch of research going on John McAfee’s story and we will be returning to the John McAfee series covering his journey from Belize very soon.  

Keep reading SiliconANGLE for the rest of the posts the McAfee series.

John McAfee’s Ultimate Hack.

Deconstructing McAfee.

John McAfee in Belize, land of pirates.

More to come…