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Comment by rdegges | Hacker News Reader

I never thought I'd end up pitching something I worked on in a Hacker News thread, but here it goes anyway:

I actually just finished building an MVP of a product business with a friend that we're launching later today: https://www.burnerphone.us

Essentially, we sell these pre-paid disposable cell phone kits that 'expire' after 30 days of usage (and come with unlimited talk and text, nationwide US coverage).

We actually built the thing with security in mind, specifically because of the incredible amount of information that's now gathered not only by phone companies, but by the government as well. Want to make a phone call that won't be personally associated with you, from telephone company phone records? If so -- you really need to use a separate device (a Burner Phone).

Anyhow, sorry for the plug in this thread, but thought it could lead to an interesting converstation.

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Errr, this sounds great as long as you limit your use to only one phone call or text message. Not long after that traffic analysis (what's enabled by capture of what sounds like the vast majority of the nation's telephone metadata as we gather is happening) will connect you to those you phone, making the apparent gains illusory.

If you keep the phone turned off when you're not making calls and call from random locations in some big city, the GPS location data won't be very useful. For example, "this phone was used to make calls from a few scattered parks in Washington DC" doesn't really help to track down who leaked some item of classified information. Using the phone from your house or workplace even once could be a dead giveaway, so if you're security-conscious enough to want to have an untraceable phone, you would have to use it in the way I described.

So, since the government is indeed collecting an enormous amount of data -- it definitely makes it 'harder' to stay truly anonymous -- but this is a much more anonymous solution than anything else as you are making it as difficult as possible:

- New phone numbers. - Different cell signal piggyback depending on where you're located. - 30 day cell tower location tracking / SMS storage / phone call storage -- so in the worst case scenario you've got 30 days of conversation / messages stored.

If an entity wanted to track YOU, they'd have to do voice analysis of every call in the country / region, look for specific writing patterns / keywords in your sms messages, and then try to match things up (this would be really difficult, even with lots of information to go from).

Anyhow, it's definitely not a perfect solution, but one that really helps protect privacy.

You should add a way to "recycle" the used phones. Maybe a trade in program?

1. Making it even more secure and harder to track. One phone can be used by many people.

2. Keep cost down for the physical device.

We're actually working on all of the above right now.

We ended up rushing to get this to market due to the press news on the subject, so we ended up leaving out the things above -- but those are coming in the next week or two :)

The web site mentions that there will be a way to get phones and SIMs separately, so you could discard the SIM and keep the phone.

The entreprenuer in my heart really appreciates, and gives full kudos for, helping creating a product for the market. But, the ecological side of me just freaked out enough respond. Technological waste is a real issue.

Please consider a prominent and easy way to recycle these phones, whether re-use, recycle or repurpose. For instance, pre-paid, pre-printed, anonymous mailing to a recycle center.

Sincerely.

We'll definitely be adding something like this in the near future -- we actually rushed to finish up our website yesterday due to all the press discussion about the NSA stuff -- we were planning to launch in a week with a much nicer website / support stuff in place.

Thank you for the comment, we completely agree.

Your Burnerphone is an interesting idea, but how does it compare to buying a prepaid wireless phone from a brick and morter store with cash?

Can your phones be recycled? What carrier are you using?

We're basically trying to compete with the prepaid wireless phones from physical locations. We think we're better because:

- You can order the product online without making a physical appearance anywhere.

- Many of the prepaid cell phones in physical stores come with the SIM chips activated -- so the phone's location has already been broadcasted to cell towers and is pre-registered, making it slightly less anonymous for the end user.

- We're going to be accepting bitcoin in the near future (we're finishing that integration now), so we hope to compete with cash purchases in that regard.

- You can recycle these phones like you would normal phones.

- We piggyback off a ton of different US carriers -- so as you move around you'll be swapping between various carriers in your region.

GREAT idea! I ordered 5 of these with my credit card...

That made me laugh, I didn't even think of the fact that you needed to use a credit card. I suppose you could get a prepaid card.

We're currently adding in BitCoin / PayPal support right now -- nothing is perfect, but this is sort of a MVP.

After payment is accepted, we wipe our database columns with any user information as well, basically making it as hard as possible to identify users.

We laugh, but from The Wall Street Journal today (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732429910457852...):

"U.S. Collects Vast Data Trove

"By SIOBHAN GORMAN, EVAN PEREZ and JANET HOOK

"WASHINGTON—The National Security Agency's monitoring of Americans includes customer records from the three major phone networks as well as emails and Web searches, and the agency also has cataloged credit-card transactions, said people familiar with the agency's activities."

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