bsstoner

Thanks for trying us out and for the feedback. We are have had some bugs with voicemail that we should have resolved now. And improving the network is our #1 priority this year. Hopefully you'll give us another shot down the road!

We don’t operate our own towers and as you point out we can’t control what someone there does. Our privacy and security model is to treat the towers as untrustworthy. This is why we do things like rotate your IMSI daily or split your traffic across multiple underlying network partners. We want to make any data that is collected noisy and less valuable to data brokers.

It depends what your threat model is. Most telco data collection and resale is based on IMSI’s attached to KYC’d customers. If they can’t get personal information and the IMSI looks like it’s a day old, that data is inherently less valuable to data brokers. The large telcos have plenty of clean data with stable IMSI’s tied to KYC’d customers that is worth more.

We receive in cleartext and encrypt with a key controlled by the customer. Most carriers store voicemail and SMS in cleartext on their servers. The goal is reduce exposure while preserving interoperability. This post on encrypted voicemail gets into more technical details about how it works: https://www.cape.co/blog/product-feature-encrypted-voicemail...

This is valid feedback and it’s on us to earn trust over time through our actions. I will say that Cape is a company of almost 100 people from many different backgrounds. Prior to Cape I spent almost a decade at DuckDuckGo. We’re a group of people that is frustrated with the status quo in the telco industry and want to do better.

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.

We’re working on an audit now. There’s an RFC on Reddit looking for input: https://www.reddit.com/r/CapeCellular/s/zTn7HQ0emo

This is good feedback. We don’t want caps and throttling to be a blocker for signing up and using us. Since we’re at a premium price point we should economically be able to be a lot more generous than existing carriers.

Appreciate the feedback, we’ll likely experiment with different plans down the road, but for now we’re focused on rolling out as much additional privacy/security value as we can to justify the premium price point.

Appreciate the shoutout. We love what Apple is doing in this area. There is a lot of room for them to help improve things at the modem/hardware/OS layer.

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?

Details on what the tower sees are at the table in the bottom of this blog post: https://www.cape.co/blog/product-feature-identifier-rotation...

Hi -- Head of Product at Cape. This is a good question. I will say up front there is no silver bullet for privacy on cellular networks given the way they were designed to interoperate. Our strategy is to offer many different protections that collectively make it harder for your activity to be tracked.

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.

Thanks, appreciate the post and questions.

On throttling, I can’t share exactly how it works, but we are doing the bare minimum just to curtail runaway abuse. You will most likely not notice.

We are exclusively eSIM, and compatible on all iPhones that support eSIM.

Happy to answer any other questions and feel free to send along any feedback if you end up trying it out.

Hi — I’m Head of Product at Cape. We’re excited to launch out of beta. I’m happy to answer any questions people have.

Hi -- I'm Head of Product at Cape (previously led product at DuckDuckGo). We are indeed trying to provide an alternative to all the data collection and sharing major carriers do in the US. Happy to answer any questions people have about Cape.

Sorry about that, we had a brief issue with our proxy, it should be working properly now.

DuckDuckGo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=315142

This was in fact an issue with queries containing quotes on our /lite and /html sites. It should be fixed now. Let me know if you see any other issues.

What happened is we frequently get hit by bots trying to scrape the links from our /lite and /html sites and we have to react by creating rules to try to block them. This particular rule, was over-aggressive. Our ops team is going to discuss internally how to prevent something like this from happening again.

Thanks!

Thanks for the feedback. We only return videos from YouTube right now, but expanding that is definitely something we'd like to do in the future.

Thanks, these are helpful. Is it mostly searches with quoted words?

brian@duckduckgo.com

Disclaimer: I work for DDG.

I'd be interested in looking into any examples of searches where the results aren't good enough or where it seems to have gotten worse recently.

As far as I know there haven't been any changes over the past few weeks that would have made things worse.

It actually does use WebRTC in Chrome. It falls back to Flash in FF right now.

They can both be configured in Settings: https://duckduckgo.com/settings

Try selecting the Classic theme in the side menu. It has blue/purple links, darker description text + full urls.

We have implemented a bunch of the feedback from the original discussion. Detailed release notes were posted in the forum: https://duck.co/forum/thread/5747/duckduckgo-beta-refinement... https://duck.co/forum/thread/5851/duckduckgo-beta-refinement...

We also added themes (in the side menu) to address some of the feedback on contrast. Classic theme reverts to the color scheme of the old site. And you can fine tune the individual colors further in Settings.

You can also fine tune the individual colors on the results page in Settings (https://duckduckgo.com/settings)

Try adding 'news' to the query: https://next.duckduckgo.com/?q=amazon+news

Awesome! Thanks so much for the kind feedback.

I'm interested in what people think of this type of course vs. some of the interactive guitar learning software out there?

Rocksmith - http://rocksmith.ubi.com

Rock Prodigy - http://rockprodigy.com

Ovelin - http://ovelin.com

Jamstar - http://jamstar.co

Miso Media - http://misomedia.com

Instinct - http://getinstinct.com

Disclaimer, I'm a cofounder at Instinct.

thanks, just fixed it.

more info on what this is here: http://www.blakejennelle.com/2011/02/disco-slideshow-crazy-m...