Privacy stalwart Nicholas Merrill spent a decade fighting an FBI surveillance order. Now he wants to sell you phone service—without knowing almost anything about you.
Yes, there are still some services where there are absolutely zero questions asked and all you need is a prepaid card that doesn’t need to be activated at all. Those are quite rare and have a very limited number of phone numbers allocated to them and pretty much are all flagged as spam/bots by every single system out there.
The next tier up are services where you technically don’t need to provide any ID to use a prepaid card… but the store you purchased it from needs your ID/credit card to activate the card when you buy it. Those ALSO tend to have the same problems with burned numbers.
What most people have as burners these days are just the same phone service as anyone else. They just pay a rebranded t-mobile at the start of the month rather than the end of the month. And those have all the same restrictions, and capabilities, as “real” phone plans.
Interesting. I thought it was more like in Czech Republic. Buy a prepaid SIM, put it into phone, it activates with the first call and there you go.
When I checked one from T-Mobile, name and surname get automatically pre-filled in the personal data card, as “Anonym Anonym”, that is.
It really didn’t used to be this way. I remember distinctly walking into a metro PCs store in the late 2000’s/early 2010’s and being told by the guy there they didn’t care what your name was, you could write down bugs bunny and they’d still take your payment and activate your service. But because of that lots of… Less than reputable people did just that and things kind of ended up how they are now.
I think there was at one point a switch to VOIP because of that change, and after that VOIP providers started tightening things down, so now your best bet is probably to pay someone in crypto to import an already activated phone.
De facto, no.
Yes, there are still some services where there are absolutely zero questions asked and all you need is a prepaid card that doesn’t need to be activated at all. Those are quite rare and have a very limited number of phone numbers allocated to them and pretty much are all flagged as spam/bots by every single system out there.
The next tier up are services where you technically don’t need to provide any ID to use a prepaid card… but the store you purchased it from needs your ID/credit card to activate the card when you buy it. Those ALSO tend to have the same problems with burned numbers.
What most people have as burners these days are just the same phone service as anyone else. They just pay a rebranded t-mobile at the start of the month rather than the end of the month. And those have all the same restrictions, and capabilities, as “real” phone plans.
Interesting. I thought it was more like in Czech Republic. Buy a prepaid SIM, put it into phone, it activates with the first call and there you go.
When I checked one from T-Mobile, name and surname get automatically pre-filled in the personal data card, as “Anonym Anonym”, that is.
Has any of this changed in the last three years?:
Nope I use mint with fake info and they don’t care
It really didn’t used to be this way. I remember distinctly walking into a metro PCs store in the late 2000’s/early 2010’s and being told by the guy there they didn’t care what your name was, you could write down bugs bunny and they’d still take your payment and activate your service. But because of that lots of… Less than reputable people did just that and things kind of ended up how they are now.
I think there was at one point a switch to VOIP because of that change, and after that VOIP providers started tightening things down, so now your best bet is probably to pay someone in crypto to import an already activated phone.