I came upon an interesting solution to a largely ignored element of personal privacy. Many of us are aware of how vulnerable we are to online surveillance, whereby our every move around the internet is likely tracked, and then sold to data aggregators and marketing firms. Purchasers or thieves of our compiled online activities have access to richly detailed profiles based on our browsing history, social media posts and comments, purchases, etc. We are finely categorized within increasingly more specific demographic groups that identify us by our politics, religion, livelihoods, material affluence, influence, location, etc. The one largely ignored aspect of this surveillance is geolocation. While we can try to obfuscate our identity and activity by using VPNs, proxies, and other relays to appear to be operating somewhere far removed from our actual location, the reality is that it's a hit-or-miss proposition. Eventually, enough clues are uncovered to reveal our true location. Our phones, their operating systems, our mobile providers, and our ISPs betray our location privacy. There are plenty of apps to provide content privacy in online communications, mostly through E2E (End-to-End) encryption, but there's no convenient way to avoid the ability of our cellular service providers to track us. We have to connect to their towers. Other than cycling through burner phones using prepaid minutes and data purchased with cash while trying to disguise ourselves to evade the security cameras with facial recognition in and around the vendors of the prepaid phones and minutes, while also leaving your burner phone somewhere far removed from your regular purchases of these items, there's no way to stay anonymous for long. Even these gyrations will eventually prove futile. Surveillance Capitalism is the science tying all of these disparate elements together to uniquely identify and profile us. A new company has emerged with a new approach, initially targeted for high-risk individuals. If you're involved in public or private security, a mental health or legal or financial professional responsible for maintaining client confidentiality, or perhaps involved in cryptocurrency, you can get some level of security through a new phone service provider. A provider who will help to anonymize you by allowing you to change the unique identifiers built into the cellular service ecosystem. You'll be able to rotate through personas that you create on your favorite phone, rather than cycling through burner phones and accounts. You'll be able to obfuscate your identity (as revealed by your phone) and therefore your location. Most of us aren't high-risk targets, because most of us aren't investigative journalists, or involved in personal security relationships with high-risk business people, celebrities, or government officials. But if you're affluent or involved in politics or social causes, if you're under witness protection or temporary restraining orders for your safety, you could find yourself actively pursued and specifically tracked, even if only because of your associations. Cape is the company providing a new approach. They will provide cellular service in the same way that MVNOs (Mobile Virtual Network Operators) like US Cellular, Boost, Cricket, etc. provide discounted service, by buying access to the 3 main cellular networks at wholesale prices and repackaging that access. But unlike the other MVNOs, they'll require a lot less identifying information about you, which means if they're the target of an information breach, there won't be a lot of PII (Personally Identifiable Information) metadata floating around to compromise you. By virtue of the ability to cycle through preset and spurious personas on the phone, the previously unique metadata identifiers associated with network tower connections won't reveal your movements and identity. This was a long-winded summary, to be sure. If you're interested in the topic, peruse the following links for more details and implications. This is not a complete solution, but it does plug a significant hole. In conjunction with a privacy-optimized phone, along with E2E content protection, online location obfuscation, and best practices, you can create enough confusion about yourself to avoid or interfere with targeting. https://www.404media.co/i-dont-own-a-cellphone-can-this-privacy-focused-network-change-that/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/18/cape-dials-up-61m-from-a16z-more-for-mobile-service-that-doesnt-use-personal-data/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/30/att-reset-account-passcodes-customer-data/ https://www.cape.co/