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.
  • utopiah@lemmy.ml
    1·
    22 hours ago

    FWIW I’m not recommending or not this service but they are :

    • based in the US, yet
    • provide international roaming
    • e-SIMs (so nothing to send)

    so it might be interesting in some cases for people not living in the US.

  • favoredponcho@lemmy.zip
    29·
    4 days ago

    A few things. If you sign up, don’t then go use the number with things that associate it to your real identity like a bank account or credit card. Also, if you’ve already used your phone with a provider that has your real name, then it’s compromised because you could be linked by the IMEI. Get a fresh phone that you’ve never linked to your identity before. Also, don’t transfer your number to this service. Get a new number provided by them. Additionally, pay with cryptocurrency.

    This is all if you want to stay truly anonymous with no traces back to you.

  • delta_fsociety@lemmy.mlEnglish
    29·
    4 days ago

    TLDR; Nicholas Merrill, a well known privacy activist, launched Phreeli, a phone service that lets you use mobile data and calls without giving your identity. It runs on T Mobiles network but only keeps a ZIP code and uses zero knowledge crypto so even payments are not linked to you. Merrill spent 10 years fighting the FBI over surveillance and now wants to make privacy simple and normal for everyone.

  • DolphinMath@slrpnk.netEnglish
    557·
    4 days ago

    Holy wall of text Batman! I’m lowkey interested in the service, but uhhhh…

      • QuestionMark@lemmy.world
        221·
        4 days ago

        I’m sorry, I truly do not intend to be impolite and I didn’t downvote you, but I think people can ask AI for a summary if they want to themselves.

        Sorry again. I just really don’t like AI, and my expectation of a social media website is for it to be about human interactions. We can talk with AI anytime we want, what we’re lacking is pure human communication.

        • Zerush@lemmy.ml
          19·
          4 days ago

          Agree, but such a brick of the posted text also don’t make easy a good conversation, in this case a summary can be helpfull knowing what is about.

          • hoppolito@mander.xyzEnglish
            8·
            4 days ago

            But that ‘brick’ of the posted text is just the article that is linked. So if we are commenting under a post dedicated to the article it would stand to reason that we read the article itself, would you not agree?

          • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlEnglish
            5·
            4 days ago

            a summary can be helpfull

            No. LLMs can’t reliably summarize without inserting made-up things, which your now-deleted comment (which can still be read in the modlog here) is a great example of. I’m not going to waste my time reading the whole thing to see how much is right or wrong but it literally fabricated a nonexistent URL 😂

            Please don’t ever post an LLM summary again.

  • gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    183·
    4 days ago

    Wait, they ask for your details when setting up a phone in America?

    I thought y’all lived in the land of the free!

    The most I’ve ever been asked for to setup a phone is my bank details, and that’s it, so they can setup direct debit for my contract

        • Schlemmy@lemmy.ml
          6·
          3 days ago

          Yes, by name. And that name has to be verified. They know everything else by default.

          • gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
            21·
            3 days ago

            They still think I live at my parents house even though I moved out 25 years ago, it’s wildly inaccurate and easy to circumvent

    • TrippingBalls@lemmy.world
      4·
      4 days ago

      I had to give a fingerprint and a picture of me holding my passport, plus copy of the passport to get a Sim in Peru…plus a half hour of my life in the process

      • gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        81·
        4 days ago

        The ability to pay money for your contract?

        Edit: they only ask for that if on Contract, if pay-as-you-go they ask for no details at all

          • gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
            5·
            4 days ago

            A direct debit is a contractual agreement, they have zero access to the bank account, just the unique identification number and an automated system that requests money from that unique identifier once per month.

            And that if there’s no money in the account, they don’t take you into credit, but instead just pause service until you pay

            • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world
              31·
              4 days ago

              These services usually have the ability to debit whatever your bill is, and then suddenly their system fucks up, or you get hacked and someone commits fraud, and before you know it a $5000 payment comes out of your account instead of the expected $30.00.

              It’s better to have that set up on a credit card in case something happens and you get a much better chance to dispute it.

              • gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
                3·
                3 days ago

                That’s literally impossible, it’s not how it works

                At the very least it’s literally impossible in UK and EU.

                The system isn’t actually taking any money from you at all, it’s merely sending requests to the bank to ask for the money.

                Some banks automatically will go “okay!”, some need human confirmation for every transaction, ALL need human confirmation for any transactions over £200 (by law)

                • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world
                  2·
                  3 days ago

                  That’s definitely a UK/EU thing then. If you get a $5000 cellphone bill in NA because someone did long distance fraud and you have pre authorized debits set up, $5000 is coming out of your account in Canada and USA.

                  Edit: assuming you have 5k and or have overdraft on the account. Not sure what happens if you have less than 5k and no overdraft. Like I don’t know if it’d take you to $0, or fail and charge you a insufficient fund fee.

            • NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip
              2·
              4 days ago

              Depends on where you live of course. I always find it very disconcernibg linking bank accounts even I countries where it should be ok. The fuck ups are way too many for me. I don’t want any of that.

  • infinitesunrise@slrpnk.netEnglish
    10·
    4 days ago

    Nick Merrill! This guy is awesome! I met him a few times back around 2014 when I sold him a bunch of old Dell server racks, presumably for use by his organization Calyx. This was a few years after his case against the FBI ended and he was able to talk freely about it. I’d been following the case previously so it was like meeting a personal hero, even though we were just manually humping Dell pizza boxes into his van. Legit guy, really cares.

  • potatopotato@sh.itjust.works
    23·
    4 days ago

    Okay I looked over their stuff, a couple thoughts:

    I want them to be more clear in their privacy policy about what exactly they can and would reveal for a court order, what their screening process is for those orders, under what conditions they would fight one and if they will reveal anything outside the context of a full court order.

    Reason: this is one of your biggest areas of vulnerability when signing up for a phone plan.

    The lexipol leaks showed that many police departments use phone information requests so much that they include a set of request forms (typically one for each carrier) in the appendix of their operations manuals. Frequently the forms are the only data request tool in that appendix.

    If you happened to have a call with someone who then did something Cool™ and got picked up, expect the detective to have your name and address on a post-it on their desk by the next morning. If you talked to them on some online chat platform they’ll send a court order to that platform for your IP then do the same to your carrier to unmask your identity.

    Yes, if you were also sufficiently Cool™ they’ll start doing more invasive things like directly tracking your phone via tower dumps, but that’s a significant escalation in time and effort. If things got Cool™ enough that this is a concern though, it may buy you time to get a new phone if you live in an area dense enough for that to not be immediately identifying.

    Also: I suspect the zip code is completely unverifiable so put whatever you want in there, basically pick your favorite sales tax rate.

      • potatopotato@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        4 days ago

        That’s the question, what are they actually providing to warrants. You don’t need to provide a name to be able to identify someone. Do they provide logs or data that could be uniquely identifying before the police pull a tower dump? Who knows…

  • quick_snail@feddit.nl
    12·
    4 days ago

    Merrill says. “If we were able to set up our own network of cell towers globally, we can set the privacy policies of what those towers see and collect.”

    Well that’s ambitious

  • ray@lemmy.mlEnglish
    26·
    5 days ago

    You don’t even need a zipcode if you use https://silent.link/ then you can pay with whatever crypto and have an esim where the balance never expires and it works in most of the world. I’ve used it a few months and it’s pretty good if you don’t need a phone number.