Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid
cape.co
cape.co
Last I checked 256 Kbps is not high speed. You can advertise this as unlimited data, or you can advertise it as 50 GB of high-speed data, but you can't call it unlimited high-speed data.
The search engine has nothing to do with it.
To get access to IMEI and IMSI, you need to either be a carrier app, allowlisted, or grant the `READ_PRIVILEGED_PHONE_STATE` permission.
Unless Chrome is running at a system level in AOSP or some OEM specific firmware, I wouldn't expect it to have `READ_PRIVILEGED_PHONE_STATE`
[1] - https://grapheneos.org/faq#hardware-identifiers
[2] - https://source.android.com/docs/core/connect/device-identifi...
It ends up being the same as charging $5 if you go over, but it'll feel much more premium.
I don’t mind that you have caps, I consider caps to be a marketable form of 90th percentile billing to consumers, so please don’t take this as “remove all caps” — but definitely find an in-between that’s more nuanced than “you reach arbitrary threshold 50G at 1gbps 5G and so it only took 8 minutes and 40% battery, too bad so sad now your entire month of data is at DSL speeds”. (This sarcastic tone is not a critique of you! but of the general carrier practices that leave me worried about you.)
In a dream world my usage percentile for the past 30 days would be inversely proportional to my bandwidth speed so that momentary usage to download a software update had no meaningful impact, but running nonstop continuous data for four hours straight caused a measurable drop in bandwidth (which protects my battery and the network health). It’s not fiber-optic or fixed-installation wireless and I do respect the shared base antenna capacity problems!
I don’t really think about caps all that much except in theory. I would love speed tests to be excepted from caps, but I get why that isn’t always workable.
Comcast I think is the best? Haven't checked in a while but their mobile plan I think soft caps to 1Mbps.
I'd be interested to see how they are hardening the IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) and VoLTE/VoWifi stack. SIP signaling and RTP streams for voice are often unencrypted internally.
If Cape is applying their 'Network Lock' logic to the IMS layer, they could potentially mitigate SIP-level spoofing and voice interception that occurs at the interconnect. Their 'Encrypted Voicemail' (using asymmetric keys on the device) is a strong signal that they understand the 'Last Mile' problem.
Also even if SEPPs are not really a thing, i'd be curious to know if they've started looking at this.
In the small world of telco security (disclaimer i work for P1Security), they are definitely working in the right direction. Any international ambition, particularly in EU, will be a tough sell though....
>Protect yourself from persistent tracking by rotating your IMSI every 24 hours, so you appear as a new subscriber each day.
But nothing for IMEI, which is fixed for a given device. Unless you got a new phone to use with this service, it can instantly be linked back to whatever previous service you're using. If we assume that whatever carrier they partner with keeps both IMEI and IMSI logs (why wouldn't they?) it basically makes any privacy benefits from this questionable. It's like clearing your cookies but not changing your IP (assuming no CGNAT).
The other benefits also seem questionable. "Disappearing Call Logs" don't really help when the person you're calling has a carrier that keeps logs, and if both of you care about privacy, why not just use signal?
They're asking $99/month for this, which is a bit steep. If you only care about the rotating IMSI, don't care about PSTN access (ie. no calls/texting), you can replicate it with some sort of data esim for much cheaper. The various e-shops that sell esims don't do KYC either.
The details of what our carrier partners can see is in the table at the bottom of our privacy summary: https://www.cape.co/privacy-summary. We add noise to their data by doing things like rotating your IMSI daily and spreading traffic among multiple carrier partners. If the data is messy enough and not associated with your personal information, there should be less monetary incentive for the carrier to try to piece it together when they have an abundance of clean data with stable identifiers and verified personal information.
Additionally, with disappearing call logs, it's about reducing surface area. Fewer logs in less places.
It’s interesting that Apple is going down a similar path with hardware filtering location retrieval commands and neighborhood-level blurring on their C1 modems. Really awesome work from that team by making sure they’ve considered privacy as a first party feature for that chip.
How do you guys view the relative value of privacy/security at the network provider layer of the cell stack for the average user/citzen?
Even if Cape doesn’t retain metadata yourselves (eg LTE positioning info), is that data not still retained and repackaged by the tower owners themselves? Eg babel street, venntel, etc. A rotating IMEI every 24 hours might make it marginally more difficult for logical tracking, but there’s still only physically one location the phone can be in without fuzzing at the hardware level.
I should also say - I’ve been following y’all’s work for a while (and considered some of those early forward deployed engineer positions), but I’m struggling to see how this all works as a consumer product. Would be awesome to see an eventual partnership with Apple/Qualcomm to bring this to the hardware level since privacy is a tough nut to crack even at full MVNO.
On the tower question, you’re right, we can’t control what data is collected by the tower owners. Like I said above our strategy is to add noise through a variety of methods that makes it harder (not impossible) for anyone collecting data to track you. We also give you multiple phone numbers. I think this stuff adds up and is a meaningful improvement over the status quo for most average user/citizens.
I like to use the organic food analogy. If given the choice, why not choose the carrier that is actually making an effort not to track you vs everyone else who clearly doesn’t care?
Organic garlic never talked up a partnership with <society-scale nasty characters>.
Are there any technical writeups on this yet? I agree, it’s really cool and would love to read about how they’re doing it
You mean the ICCID?
But realistically, none of that matters. You'll be the only one in 10 miles with this SIM that always uses an never-before-seen IMEI that connects to the exact same set of domains. That's some mall ninja stuff.
Carriers don't just log IMEI/IMSI, as well as last hop cell towers and your precise location, they need those information to route packets back to the phone. You can't establish TLS with bogus IP addresses. That's why people like Stallman or unnamed friend of a friend ex-CIA guys on Internet says cell technologies are evil mass surveillance tools.
Always-on Mullvad solves that nicely.
Whoops.
Look at who Doyle has worked for previously and what connections he has. Palantir and the military, to start.
Prior to Cape, I led the national security business at Palantir. That experience was actually the catalyst for Cape. It’s where I first learned about the massive array of vulnerabilities that exist in our current cellular networks. I saw how those gaps impacted not just government organizations, but everyday people, and I realized that the mobile phones we carry every day are perhaps the single largest risk to our privacy.
I needed that experience to understand the depth of the problem, but once I left to start Cape, that connection ended. Cape has no ties to Palantir. We aren't a subsidiary, we aren't a "front," and we don't share data with them. The only thing we took from Palantir was the desire to fix a broken system. If you want to see me and some of the rest of our founding team talk more about this topic, you can watch this video on our Instagram page here.
Another related theory I’ve seen online is that Cape is a honeypot for law enforcement. Cape is not a honeypot. It’s so hard to prove a negative, but at least I can say it clearly and out loud: Cape is not a honeypot.
We are a group of individuals who deeply value privacy. That mission carries across everything we do, from our work with the US government and allies, to everyday people, and everything in between.
We are incredibly proud to work with people who protect our country by ensuring they have secure, trusted communications wherever they are. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-18/us-navy-t...
We also work with the EFF to provide investigative journalists and activists with free Cape service so they can do their work safely. https://www.cape.co/journalists-and-activists
We partner with non-profits to support victims of domestic abuse who are facing cyber-stalking and digital harassment. https://www.cape.co/break-free
We are a young company growing exponentially, and we don't plan on slowing down. We know we have to earn your trust every day. The truth is, no one else is building a high-quality, first-class solution to these specific cellular problems. We are committed to being the ones who do it right.
That is a lot of highly polished for the camera media you dropped into that post. The way that you word things, such as "Cape is not a honeypot." but don't delve any deeper, to start, gives someone less than zero confidence or trust in your words.
I have seen enough in the industry to say that your words are meaningless.
You're right that you don't need to do those things, but I would argue that my background made me uniquely situated to understand and care about these problems deeply enough to spend years of my life building a company in response.
I say "Cape is not a honeypot" a lot just so I don't appear to be mincing words. If you want to delve deeper on how we treat customer data, a couple of good resources are our privacy policy: https://www.cape.co/privacy-summary
And our trust page: https://trust.cape.co/
You can also check out our blog for a bunch of posts on specific features we've built, etc.
It's my least favorite thing about HN that high-quality new accounts, such as founders jumping into threads about their work, sometimes get throttled by the software. Gah.
Glad to see we won't run into it again, and that our workaround wasn't a problem.
Maybe but this line of argumentation also opens the door to more criticism. Anyone looking at Palantir from the outside only knows their reputation and involvement in unsavory projects before taking a job. You chose to take the job with that knowledge covering most of your field of view. You stayed to work for that company contributing to that kind of work. That's a signal that's brighter than the valuable experience you gathered there. Tech can be learned but the values needed to support or even tolerate Palantir's activities don't get easily changed.
The premise of your company pivots on trust, not technology, the same tech is known and available to everyone else too. And it's trust in you that you will do what you say, not that you can do what you say. The latter is a given, you clearly have the knowhow. The former is putting any promise in doubt.
> Cape routes your traffic through our US-based mobile core.
This sounds like an anti-feature when it comes to privacy or the paranoid.
> I say "Cape is not a honeypot" a lot just so I don't appear to be mincing words.
I appreciate you saying it but Crypto AG probably also said that a lot (figuratively).
> Cape does not keep this data.
Unfortunately you are limited in what you can do here. Having or processing this data for any amount of time, even without keeping it, puts you in the position to be compelled to provide it.
One of the efforts we’re working on now is an audit of our data retention claims. We recently posted an RFC on Reddit if anyone from this community has input: https://www.reddit.com/r/CapeCellular/s/zTn7HQ0emo
We plan to continue to do more things like this that increase transparency and build trust over time.
Very hard to make the latter usable by anyone else IMO.
Neither or against either perception but this reminds me of https://barrypopik.com/blog/i_know_its_not_true_but_lets_mak...
Can you expand on this? Because currently, the US government is not someone I want the companies I use to work with.
> The only thing we took from Palantir was the desire to fix a broken system.
What broken system does Palantir fix?
> group of individuals who deeply value privacy
.. do you see the problem here?
Currently in cyber as a Guard O/civ and also considering SFAS. Thank you!
Only you know if you want to jump into SFAS. I knew I'd always regret not doing it, which made the decision easy for me.
I'm sure you know this, but for others who may not: there's a history of splashy new mobile operators which promise security and privacy as their core feature, but turn out to be a front for law enforcement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Trojan_Shield is the preeminent example.
There are also people working in this space who are cranks and morons. In summer 2023, I had a phone call with the founder of a well-known startup founder from the dot-com era. He was trying to launch a privacy-focused cell network and messaging software. But everything about his approach was wrong, almost to the point of being an anti-solution to the problems he was trying to solve, as if he was totally unaware of the past 20-30 years' worth of learning about end-to-end encryption and mass surveillance.
He was also a conspiracy theorist: during our call, he repeatedly and unironically referred to a documentary film created by a well-known convicted felon and serial liar, as a source of credible information about the world.
> We also work with the EFF to provide investigative journalists and activists with free Cape service so they can do their work safely. https://www.cape.co/journalists-and-activists
That's good to know.
It appears from the EFF site that you were involved in developing the Rayhunter tool which they announced last year? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/03/meet-rayhunter-new-ope...
Looks like a pretty sweet honey pot.
By the way, if you look at this thread you can see Cape has deployed narrative control.
> At Palantir, where I started in technical roles more than 10 years ago, I learned about a wide array of vulnerabilities in the cellular network that present a threat not only to mission-focused organizations in government, but also to everyday people. I came to see mobile phones — and the networks that power them — as perhaps the largest risks to our privacy and security.
> If you told Americans twenty years ago that corporations and governments would conspire to attach powerful tracking devices to nearly every adult worldwide, it would’ve sounded like science fiction. And yet, that’s not far from where we are today.
https://www.cape.co/blog/building-the-future-of-mobile-priva...
How does the company handle the split between your defense and consumer products? Do you see there being conflicting interests here?
A helpful thing to keep in mind is that everyone has basically 2 use cases for their cell phones:
1. Send and receive calls and SMS 2. Connect to the internet
Whether you're a national security professional, an investigative journalist, or an average consumer who values privacy, that's what you do with your phone. So if we can build features that make you more secure and more private across those two use cases, we have a product that can help both government and consumer users.
Sometimes when people ask the "conflict" question they mean some version of "but doesn't the government then ask you for a backdoor to get all the data?" All we can really do here is stand by our privacy policy. We store the minimum amount of data possible, we promise not to sell your data to anyone, we notify our users if we receive legal process on their account that is not subject to a gag order, and we pledge to push back on any law enforcement request we receive that is not well formed and narrowly tailored as required by law.
The backdoor/honeypot fears are often related to the Anom story that came out a few years ago. It's not a perfect rebuttal, but the reporter that broke that story has written about Cape a couple of times. You can read those articles here:
https://www.404media.co/privacy-telecom-cape-introduces-disa...
https://www.404media.co/i-dont-own-a-cellphone-can-this-priv...
We may or may not be convinced by the details you're able to give us, but regardless of that you've made the discussion more informed, technical, and less speculative, which is in the best spirit of HN.
Seeing a warrant canary would be encouraging…
I came to the conclusion the best we can do is what you see in our privacy policy: we notify our users when we're served with legal process that is not subject to a gag order, and we pledge to push back on any law enforcement request we receive that is not properly formed or narrowly tailored as required by law. I'd love input/ideas on how to be stronger here.
> Minimal Data Collection
> Identifier Rotation
> Secondary Numbers
> Disappearing Call Logs
> SIM Swap Protection
> Network Lock
> Encrypted Voicemail
> Private Payment
> Last-Mile Encrypted Texting
> Secure Global Roaming
"Identifier (IMSI) Rotation", "Secure Global Roaming" and "Network Lock" do look interesting *IF* they can actually address some of the baseband vulnerabilities that plague all modern devices. That's a Big If.
SIM Swap Protection you already get by using a VoIP number rather than a cell number.
And the other features are irrelevant if you're using over-the-top end-to-end encrypted messaging, like Signal, rather than Plain Old Telephone Service and SMS.
Also, the 50 foreign countries seems interesting.
The primary difference is we run our own mobile core entirely.
Can you elaborate on the hops question? Not sure I quite understand what you're asking since there are a few ways to interpret "hops".
I've talked to a few tangentially and it seems like an interesting space.
Not really, but I too am uncertain about how to think about it.
Here's my long-winded but still limited understanding of the main vulnerabilities that are unique :
NETWORKS: If I build a network, and I build it out of switched Ethernet, and I control the premises completely, then I can generally trust that the data flowing through it isn't being secretly logged or tampered with. Moving away from this simplicity, my distrust of the network increases rapidly.
A cellular network is pretty much the opposite of this simple one-man, one-room, wired network, so I distrust it completely.
There is only one credible solution here: all traffic over the network must be end-to-end encrypted and authenticated. That means TLS/DTLS/QUIC/ESP/Wireguard with key-pinning and/or correctly implemented and maintained PKI. Assume that any and all traffic that is not E2E-encrypted and authenticated is subject to some combination of mass surveillance and/or individually-targeted attacks.
CELLULAR DEVICE HARDWARE: For historical reasons, modern smartphones contain [at least] two CPUs:
1. The main "application" processor, an ARM64 SoC running an OS and applications made by Google or Apple. They've put substantial efforts into hardening these OSes and applications against remote attacks.
Whether they're doing "enough" is another question; whether you should trust them is another question. But they're at least trying pretty hard to prevent rando malware-for-hire attackers from pwning your device via over-the-air vulnerabilities.
2. The "baseband" processor, a ghastly fossilized thing that runs a stack of overly-complex firmware dating back to 2G days, and controls access to the cellular network. It is probably developed by Qualcomm, which along with Samsung has a near-monopoly on baseband processors for modern devices sold outside of China. Qualcomm in particular is litigious and complacent about security issues (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38620067), and almost everything about the processors and their firmware are closed-source and non-public.
The baseband processor is insecure both due to inattention, as well as treachery. The end user of the device does NOT control it in the way that the end user controls the main processor. Some nebulous combination of the baseband vendor, the carrier, and the government controls it (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46848303).
So the baseband processor is an untrustworthy thing that should be walled off from the rest of the system, and only allowed to communicate with the rest of it via narrow and well-defined interfaces. However, this was not the case for many years: the baseband processor has had way too much access to the system.
In recent years, this situation has improved somewhat: recent Pixel devices with Google Tensor SoCs (and maybe others) have the baseband isolated via an IOMMU. https://grapheneos.org/faq#baseband-isolation
---
Okay, so can "Cape" do anything to assuage my concerns about _any_ of the above issues? Honestly, not very much. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Cape can't increase my trust in the cellular network. Cape can't increase my trust in the baseband processor on my device.
Cape can only do a couple things to make the baseband and the network Slightly Less Evil: shuffle IMSI frequently to prevent IMSI-based tracking, and don't let random scammers call up and SIM-swap me.
Trackability is definitely a vulnerability.
IMSI tracking is a consequence of how baseband devices communicate over-the-air, just as WiFi MAC address tracking is a consequence of how 802.11 devices communicate over-the-air.
And it's definitely a vulnerability, because it's used to track end users and reduce their privacy.
So it IS a baseband vulnerability. And IMSI randomization mitigates it to some degree, just as WiFi and Bluetooth MAC randomization mitigate tracking via those identifiers.
Baseband vulnerabilities are overhyped, imo. On proper phones (eg. pixels), their access to memory is restricted by IOMMU, which protects the rest of the phone from being compromised if there's some sort of an exploit. Once that's factored in, most exploits you can think of are "on the other side of the airtight hatchway[1]". For instance if you can hack the baseband to steal traffic, you should probably be more worried about your carrier being hacked or getting a lawful intercept order. Or if you're worried about the phone triangulating itself, you should probably be more worried about your carrier getting hacked and/or selling your location data.
[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060508-22/?p=31...
That just kicks the can down the road to "Why should we fully trust the IOMMU?"
Granted, it does defend against the vast majority of actors.
You raise a good point.
Doesn't Google require all new Android-branded devices to isolate the baseband from the Android OS and applications?
I swear I read this somewhere in the last few years, though I can't seem to find any clear reference to it now. Hmmm.
> For instance if you can hack the baseband to steal traffic, you should probably be more worried about your carrier being hacked or getting a lawful intercept order.
Everything should use TLS/DTLS/QUIC, and an up-to-date PKI for obligatory certificate validation, otherwise I assume it's already being MITM'd by the NSA, every other three letter agency on the planet, corporate firewalls, and my ISP.
If anyone knows of a good, secure VoIP provider outside of the US I'd be keen to hear about it.
Also, many Canadian financial institutions (including the CRA, Wealthsimple, and BMO) work fine with US phone numbers for 2FA… including Google Voice, in my personal experience. https://www.reddit.com/r/Googlevoice/comments/1c571kw
Always ask for the Port Order Number (PON) so you can follow up with the other carrier to see what they received from VoIP.ms
Most services either don't have a legitimate interest in my phone number (so they can get bent) or they do have a legitimate interest in which case not accepting my phone number means they aren't doing their #$&^ job (so they can get bent).
It helps that the only services I'm willing to provide my phone number to are those that already inherently involve my PII. Banks, online shopping, etc. So if they won't accept whatever I give them I'll take my business to a competitor.
I've had almost no problems using my GV number for 2FA. Venmo is literally the only service I've ever used that won't accept it for 2FA… and now Venmo offers non-SMS based alternatives, which is good because SMS-based 2FA is the reason that the SIM-swap attack is worth doing.
List of services that allow Google Voice for 2FA: https://www.reddit.com/r/Googlevoice/comments/1c571kw/crowds...
Yep, this is a crappy change going forward :-(
However, Google Voice does not require ID verification for preexisting accounts, so this has no effect on existing users.
The customer support team was great to work with and actually extended the trial price for me. But ultimately, the service just does not seem competitive on a usability level with major carriers and this was an issue for me. It very much could have been my local area but Verizon and T-Mobile are far, far more reliabl and comparable in price.
https://www.cape.co/blog/product-feature-secondary-numbers
I've been using my Google Voice number for something similar. But Cape doesn't specify if/when these numbers are rotated in any way - you have three numbers to track now, and you can't retain these numbers if you switch services.
They are real numbers, not VOIP. That can matter depending on what they are used for and if the entity you are expecting a message from blocks sending to VOIP numbers.
The numbers don't rotate like our identifier rotation. They are yours. You can choose to delete a secondary number in the app, and if you have less than two, create a new one after 30 days.
based in Arlington, VA, is primarily funded by high-profile venture capital firms, including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), which led their Series B, A Capital, Costanoa Ventures, ex/ante, Point72 Ventures, and XYZ Ventures.*
Arlington, VA ... is an interesting location that aligns with your guess. A similar situation happened some time ago with a drug cartel that thought they built their own private phones and phone network. I am not saying it's related, just feels similar.
Which KYC regulations exist for carriers? AFAIK you can walk into any store and get a SIM card. The most they ask for is maybe E911 which they don't check.
What kind of measures are possible to prevent fraudulent calls when the caller is your anonymous customer? The answer is obviously "none," unless you respond to every complaint by terminating service of the offending customer and hoping they don't come back.
Presumably some fairly basic heuristics would be sufficient. Robocalling isn't economically viable if you only get a few calls per subscription. You need to place (I assume) at least thousands of calls per day per subscription for it to even begin to make sense. Any account doing that is going to be blindingly obvious provided you have even 30 minutes worth of logs.
I can already walk into Walmart and purchase a cheap prepaid device with cash. That's pretty close to anonymous.
Domestically you can buy a Tmobile or Cricket with a pre-paid visa cash card and a gmail address (no ID required), but they won't work outside the US.
You can sign up for US mobile service, which is a Verizon MVNO, right this moment with no personally identifiable information at all.
Remember: neither the visa nor MasterCard payment networks have any support for customer name. Everyone pretends that they do, but they do not. In the absence of an additional security layer like “verified by visa “there is no way to verify cardholder name.
(I literally put 123 Fake St in payment portals.)
I'd like a service like yours that allows private signups and that works continuously to prove ongoing private operations. I don't need huge data plans, I'm fine with WiFi mostly. It needs to cost way less per month than your current pricing. It would be cool if you could find a way to serve people like me.
Here are a few things you might want to look at more closely:
Encrypted voicemail uses public key crypto: https://www.cape.co/blog/product-feature-encrypted-voicemail
How they use full control of the mobile core to detect SS7 signaling attacks https://www.cape.co/blog/product-feature-network-lock
Swapping SIMs is done via digital signatures, not customer support https://www.cape.co/blog/cape-product-feature-secure-authent...
They're the only provider that can rotate your IMSI, and do it continuously for you https://www.cape.co/blog/product-feature-identifier-rotation
They're also one of very few organizations doing original research on cell network security:
Collaborating with the EFF to release software for detecting cell site simulators (e.g, imsi catchers et al) https://www.cape.co/blog/how-eff-and-cape-collaborated-to-im...
Identifying novel weaknesses for physically tracking people on cell networks https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3636534.3690709
Very aware of who you are, and have done plenty of security work myself. Here's what I want from you: How can you prove this isn't just Anom 2.0
It's like walking into a bank wearing a ski mask. Yeah we don't know who is under the mask but we know there is probably something fishy going on.
Your best bet at staying safe is always to not raise any attention at all, and that usually means doing what the average citizen with 2.4 kids does.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/anom-backdoor-fbi-years-of-a...
Like they're not gonna burn that kind of capability over tax evasion, state civil law violations, etc.
We're working on some ideas to address this with audits etc, but it will always be tough. However, if you like the idea, and like the features, then maybe it is worth your time to do the work and get comfortable with the company. Because we're the only ones providing some of these features, and we have a lot more in the hopper still to come. I hope we can win your trust at some point.
https://www.404media.co/privacy-telecom-cape-introduces-disa...
Even if it turned out that you were in fact a honeypot, protection against SIM swapping and encrypted voicemail presumably both provide security benefits regardless.
It's similar to the situation with VPN providers. The provider could literally be the NSA themselves and I'd _still_ most likely see security benefits from using it (unless the NSA happens to be my adversary of course).
But to be clear, you DO actually know that other cell service providers are selling your data to law enforcement:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/oct/25/att-secretl...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/09/court-rejects-ve...
Like others explained here, it’s amazing that you didn’t know these problems existed before you worked for at Plantier. If you could explain your migration from delusion to insight in a personal way of that might help me a bit more. In fact, if you said Plantier was an evil company, I might have even more faith.
If someone elsestarted this company who had a long history in privacy outside of the government, my take would be a lot different. In my humble opinion, I think you don’t really care about privacy. You’re just taking advantage of a market niche. And what can I say but that’s capitalism so good luck.
It would be better if you used your inside knowledge to fight for laws banning these practices by all the telcos.
All your software/hardware would need to be open source, you would need to be regularly audited by neutral third-parties, actively work with the community to provide paranoia-level ongoing transparency reports and continuous improvements that the community wants to see, be willing to adopt many suggestions given by smart people, and just in general stop using your words to tell people you're serious, and use your actions to show it.
If someone says they are skeptical of XYZ, ask them what they would accept as proof, and then provide it.
I'm a target for a variety of things, and knowing that no one can SIM swap me is worth the subscription alone. The SS7 protections, encrypted voicemail, secondary numbers, IMSI rotation, etc are all a bonus.
Your “phone number “that people interact with cannot be hijacked with SS7 because it’s not a real number… you’re immune to sim swaps … And you can Jettison your physical phone and SIM card at any time with no penalty.
As a bonus, because your actual phone number is now programmable you can do interesting things like set up a SMS firewall. You can, for instance, collapse all incoming text messages to ascii-256. Or truncate their overall length. Or CC your incoming SMS to a dedicated mailbox.
I have operated like this since 2016. I have no idea what my physical SIM phone number is and neither does anybody else.
If we treat the carrier as adversarial, dumb pipes we can move the security and all of the capabilities into the cloud platform. A personal comms stack like this should be carrier-agnostic, phone-agnostic, sim-agnostic.
See my other post in this HN topic - I have done this since 2016 ...
- how do I know you are actually implementing what you claim on your webpage?
First, when it ran Anom, it went out of its way not to collect data on persons inside the United States. U.S. Anom users never had any of their data captured by the FBI because it raised profound 4th Amendment concerns. Cape is operating in the U.S. and is seeking U.S. users. Typical U.S. honeypots are generally targeted abroad.
Second, the U.S. government has historically not used former military officers with ties to defense contractors as the people that built and operated the honeypots. With Anom, they co-opted trusted members of the secure phone community. The very fact that the company is very open about its founders is a pretty good sign that they are probably not a honeypot because they would not make a very good honeypot for the truly criminal element.
Third, Cape is incorporated in the United States and seeking U.S. users. In the process, it's making some fairly aggressive claims in its privacy policy and terms of service about its products that would subject them to breach of contract and fraud claims if in fact they were secretly not doing those things.
Fourth, the legacy telecoms have a long history of selling your data, secretly cooperating in national security programs of questionable legality, etc. It seems like Cape can't possible a worse option than the status quo.
2. History matters until it doesn't. There was a time when the US did not perform science experiments on unsuspecting populations, too. The government does not get the benefit of the doubt when it comes to "past performance is not indicative of future performance".
3. We have seen sitting presidents pardon people for crimes they have yet to commit.
4. "Not worse" is not a selling point.
3.) A president cannot pardon a civil claim against a company for breach of TOS.
> First, when it ran Anom, it went out of its way not to collect data on persons inside the United States. U.S. Anom users never had any of their data captured by the FBI because it raised profound 4th Amendment concerns. Cape is operating in the U.S. and is seeking U.S. users. Typical U.S. honeypots are generally targeted abroad.
1. People in the US were arrested for using Anom (despite the 14th amendment protecting both citizen and noncitizen alike, at least in the case where the non-US person is on US soil).
3. Fair point, though if it is truly a government sting operation I don't think you can take them to civil court either unless authorized under statute right?
Just my thoughts.
1/ eSIM activation outside the US 2/ The family plan is weird. My wife and I don't want to manage two separate bills. 3/ multiple eSIMs and numbers in different countries all within the one account (Germany in particular)
How does this compare to silent.link?
eSIM, global, variable pricing per country with per-GB billing, anonymous crypto payments and no KYC. Although it seems to not have some of the additional security features of the OP.
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/joseph-cox/dark-wir...