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Comment by braunshedd | Hacker News Reader

Previously discussed yesterday, and again two days before that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17069459

This is one of the reasons I use a public-facing Twilio number, which forwards to a private number which I never hand out.

This isn't something that people should have to do to opt-out of tracking like this, but it doesn't seem like there are many other reliable options.

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If you take that cell phone home with you regularly and don't live in a multi-unit building, it would be relatively trivial to figure out your identity using this data.

Undoubtably. Not a strong protection against doxxing, but might offer some semblance of protection from 'drive-by-lookups'. With a modern smartphone and location services, there's only so much you can do.

Just a heads up: Twilio now offers a metric fuckton of services geared towards SIM-enabled IoT. You can order SIM cards by the pile and then bind them to a Twilio number by activating it in the UI (or via API). So now instead of (or in addition to) simply forwarding traffic from garbage numbers to your real number, you can get Twilio numbers that are registered on T-Mobile's network via an actual SIM card, making it much easier to send from your Twilio number than it used to be without it bound to a SIM card. Fairly good price, too. Unfortunately, I'm not sure what happened to Twilio's API as it's now as opaque and awkward as any AWS API (almost as though someone on Twilio's engineering team made the decision to model their API after the way AWS builds their APIs), but the services they offer are as compelling as they always were. I'd give Twilio a solid D for what the API has turned into, but A+ for service innovation.

Last time I checked the data price for twilio sim was not good for daily use. Far cheaper to use something like Google Fi and a data only sim.

Yes, but the whole reason for using Twilio is so you can hack your telephony just the way you like it. Google Fi does not also have a ton of cool services you can take advantage of. You get a phone number and that's that, you're subject to the same old POTS-like restrictions. I don't suggest people use their Twilio SIM card for data like you would on your regular phone, even though when you look at IoT data services offered by companies that aren't also enormous wireless providers, Twilio's prices are relatively pretty good. And also calling and texting is dirt cheap but again, not like with your regular phone. I have a phone with two SIM card slots, and so I've got my regular stupid phone provider's SIM card in one slot and the Twilio SIM in the other. New versions of Android give you tremendous granularity of control with multiple SIM cards, so I can be hyper-specific about which activities should be using which SIM cards. And this granularity is very well-designed from a UX perspective, making it almost effortless to override my preferences e.g. for making a single phone call or using one specific app for a short time.

Service Meant to Monitor Inmates’ Calls Could Track You, Too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17046632

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