As for Wilcox, he has long been one of the small group of privacy enthusiasts who buy their SIM cards for cash with fake names. But he hopes Freely will offer an easier way out – not just for people like him, but for people in general.
“I don’t know anyone who’s ever offered something this reliable before,” says Wilcox. “Not the typical telecom-strip-mining-your-data phone, not the black-hoodie hacker phone, but the privacy-normal phone.”
Nevertheless, many technology companies have introduced privacy as a feature to their commercial products, which may deter consumers from buying into for-profit telecoms like Freely that offer anonymity. But EFF’s Cohn says Merrill’s track record shows he’s not just using the fight against surveillance as a marketing ploy to sell something. “After watching Nick for a long time, it’s all a means to an end for him,” she says. “And the end is privacy for everyone.”
Merrill probably not Like the implication of describing Freely as a cellular carrier where every phone is a burner phone. But there is no doubt Some? Most of the company’s customers will use its privacy protections for crime — just as is the case with every surveillance-resistant tool from Signal to Tor to briefcases of cash.
Merrill says that Freely, at the very least, will not provide a platform for spammers and robocallers. He says that even without knowing the identities of users, the company will prevent that kind of bad behavior by limiting the number of calls and texts users make and banning users from playing games on the system. “If people think this will be a safe haven to abuse the phone network, it won’t work,” says Merrill.
But Merrill regrets that some of his phone company’s customers will do bad things, he says — just as they sometimes did with pay phones, that anonymous, cash-based phone service that once existed on every block of American cities. “You put in a quarter, you didn’t have to identify yourself, and you could call whoever you wanted,” he recalls. “And 99.9 percent of the time, people weren’t doing bad things.” He argues that what remained of the small minority did not justify the involuntary social decline into the cellular panopticon in which we all live today, where a phone call No It is a rare occurrence for data to be linked to freely traded information on the caller’s identity.
<a href