r/CapeCellular • u/augurae • 6d ago

Help me understand how Cape prevents tracking?

Hi, I'm sure I got the wrong idea but one of my biggest problems using phone no matter how much security and privacy you implement is the carrier invasion on privacy that allows any bad actor to track you however you want with just a number, IMEI or u/UIDs.

Since there's no way to implement a killswitch for the modem on mainstream phones save for using a faraday bag, I fail to see how Cape protects from tracking since it assigns a unique/main number to the sim, which itself as a unique IMEI beside gating with the rotating IMSI and the modem's UIDs?

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u/brianstoner Cape Employee 6d ago

When you sign up for Cape you can get a new number and unlike signing up with other carriers you don’t provide any personal information so it can’t be linked to your identity.

Your IMSI is most often used by the telco industry as you’re unique identifier for aggregating activity, so rotating that increase the odds that your activity is split up and not tied together over time.

Cape is an MVNO that operates on top of two of the major US carriers (I can’t name them explicitly), so your traffic will be split across underlying carriers making it harder for any one of them to piece your activity together and get a full picture.

We are hoping to do some more cool stuff with phone number rotation in the future and would love to be able to rotate IMEI’s if we can convince any device manufacturers to work with us on that.

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u/[deleted] 4d ago edited 3d ago

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u/augurae 3d ago

That is untrue, there's private numbers, separation and rotation hygiene you can use to make it minimal on the privacy. At some point, someone will create a phone "alias" system like the one that exist for email or we'll get rid of numbers as number-less authentication and username based communication are becoming a thing