I’ve gotten prepaid sims for things but obviously that’s not really a feasible method for your main life phone.
where i live, you can buy a sim card that you can then charge by buying codes on kiosks. no identity needed, all cash
They got video of you buying them, though
They have your identity the moment you put the sim in the phone. The phone have unique identifiers that are recorded when sold.
Buy the phone used and/or with cash. And never put any SIM card in it that can be linked back to you or someone you know.
All the apps on your phone have access to the phone identifier. As well as other information, like your Google account. It’s pretty trivial to tie a phone to you.
As long as you keep to FOSS apps that you KNOW are private (you can tell which ones call home), you should be OK. For example, Lemmy with a throwaway email address, Simplex for communications, Mull with a shitload of blocks, Orbot with RethinkDNS, and so on, you’re golden. Buy your phone in a different country, on Ebay with a throwaway account and a prepaid credit card.
There’s a lot you can do to remain truly anonymous.
Now, my threat model does not require me to go to those extents, but you get the point.
If someone really wanted to find the person, I imagine they’d find where the signal is coming from for that device, and just narrow from there. If it always goes to/from where John works and lives, it might well be John’s phone.
That would require law enforcement to obtain the recording and have a reason to do so
I mean, yeah? If I’m buying anonymous phone credits, the police probably has a reason to go looking for me.
Act itself is not illegal… Police wouldn’t care un less you are already on Santa’s list… But it would not be police either but rather internal spooks who track that list.
It doesn’t need to be illegal for you to end up on a list of people they check up on
Yeah but you already need to be on the list for them to check at all
And even then I doubt they would. They got limited resources. with that being I have no idea about your threat model.
If it involves over zealous glowies, this comment section is prolly a bit too rookie to properly comment. Also this things are very geo specific as each jurisdiction will have their own KYC regs and compliance practices.
Most accurate comment so far.
It might be worth looking again at pay-as-you-go. Here in the UK at least, there are some ‘bundle’ plans that are not actually that much more expensive than a contract. Topping up with a voucher once a month is a bit inconvenient but not too bad. You
I don’t know to what extent the phone companies log and share your usage (if you’re in an English-speaking country it’s likely quite extensive) but I would imagine they could still identify you probabilistically by your patterns of use, including which towers you connect to. Using a VPN/proxy/TOR would at least limit the number of IP addresses they see you connecting to but that’s off topic a bit.
Thanks, that sounds like a good idea. I’ll look into what the pay-as-you-go plans are like near me
Why have a phone contract at all?
i’ve been using prepaid sims for over a decade and a half now and it works okay for me since i only use a voip number that forwards to my phones.
every major carrier i’ve used in the united states have required some sort of identifying information like a state issued id or credit card; maybe the smaller/re-sale carriers will let you use cash.
Jmp.chat
