Privacy stalwart Nicholas Merrill spent a decade fighting an FBI surveillance order. Now he wants to sell you phone service—without knowing almost anything about you.
Archived version: https://archive.is/20251205050710/https://www.wired.com/story/new-anonymous-phone-carrier-sign-up-with-nothing-but-a-zip-code/
By asking users for almost no identifiable information, Merrill wants to protect them from one of the most intractable privacy problems in modern technology: Despite whatever surveillance-resistant communications apps you might use, phone carriers will always know which of their customers’ phones are connecting to which cell towers and when. Carriers have frequently handed that information over to data brokers willing to pay for it—or any FBI or ICE agent that demands it with a court order
This is pretty pointless i believe. Your sim location can always be triangulated which means you will immediately identified if you ever go home with the sim card active.
All the feds have to do is either know where you live, or any specific location they know you were at, or your phone number and they will instantly have the same degree of insight as they would have had if you signed up to the provider with your name.
seems like it’ll still keep some demographic and payment info out of the data resale market though, no?
It’s good to reduce the number of parties that can be accountable for leaks.
If the authorities that can triangulate the locations of everyone’s phone numbers are the only ones that should be able to identify you, then at least you know who any ID leaks are coming from. That data being resold on the market should at least make those authorities look worse than if they were just letting random people get away with it.
At the same time, if it’s being oversold as more of an absolute privacy thing, making promises it can’t deliver, that makes the whole thing dubious to trust.
