It’s insane how intense the UK is being about breaking encryption. I could understand the hysteria if they had just suffered a terror attack or something and were riding public outrage, but as far as I know this is just based on some nebulous national security/protect the kids justification.

It’s insane. The U.S. and E.U. are not doing any better. The west is becoming a surveillance state.

“Is any SMS/phone call coming out of your personal number something you should consider private from the government? Probably not.”

Well your phone calls themselves – the actual conversation – shouldn’t be accessible without a warrant for a wire tap, that’s pretty longstanding precedent in the U.S. Cell phone location information is also protected by a warrant (Carpenter v. U.S.), but pen registers (logs of who you call) do not require a warrant (Smith v. Maryland). I’m not sure if governments are prevented from purchasing data from carriers, just as any data broker could do. Additionally, who knows if governments are secretly collecting phone call and cell phone data and storing it, but only accessing it once they have a warrant. It’s impossible to know what’s fully happening on the back end between big telco companies and the gov’t.

Either way, at the end of the day, whether you have Cape or some other service, if you’re at the level of the government getting a warrant for your data any legitimate company is going to comply. That’s why the best thing is to have a company that can only turn over limited amounts of data because that’s all they have.

You get you phone number through them and they act as your carrier and then they use other telcos that have the physical infrastructure to service calls/data. Not that different from how Mint or other virtual networks operate, but Cape alleges to collect little data about its users and not to sell any user data.

That’s always the concern with privacy-focused services, especially if they’re not open source or audited.

But if we think about the practical application – who needs a honeypot for cell phone services? Carriers already collect so much data (location, telemetry, payment, government-issued ID, etc) and sell it willingly to whoever wants to buy. How could Cape be any worse? lol. If they adhere to any of their stated policies it seems like a plus, no?

Additionally, at least to me, Cape is not marketing the way the Anom phone did, where it trying to gain adopting by nefarious users. That’s my take - I’m not advocating for Cape since I don’t really know much about them, but I’m trying to put things in context.

So, they have their own phone that is for high risk individuals and is not available to the general public. Then, separately they have their own mobile network that you can use with any regular phone and they sell Pixels on their website (for $50, you can have them pre-load GraphineOS). The AD i posted is for their cellular network, which is not related to their own first-party device.

I saw this video on YouTube with a rep from the company and while there were some positive things put forward, the biggest red flag to me was when he wouldn’t disclose what networks they partner with. They are a virtual network so they don’t own the cell towers, and that means they’re running off someone else’s. Why can’t you say who? Other virtual carriers have no problem saying that they run on Verizon or T-Mobile.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1C-bR728ro interview for Cape starts at about 30 minutes in. Ironically, the podcast is called “Snake Oilers” and it’s a paid-promotion thing, sooooo take this with a grain of salt.

Yeah it’s not good. And what’s funny is there no details about what it is. They’re not really selling me on what “enhanced” 5G is and why it’s a benefit.

It was a generic settings app notification that said something like “you’re getting enhanced 5G with Verizon” and that was it. I clicked it and then took the attached screenshot. No additional information other than that it shares my info.

I don’t know all the technical aspects of what my carrier might know, but I think that if you load the Chase app, for example, it’s basically just sending an https call to Chase. Not sure if Verizon would know whether that came from an app or browser.

Additionally, if you use a VPN, I don’t know if Verizon would see any of that data. But again, I’m no expert.

Yes. Under cellular. Might be a Verizon-only thing.

Excellent read

I assume the pager plan is pretty affordable too compared to cell phone data plans