This Privacy Service Tries to Prevent Your Cell-Phone Carrier From Tracking You
Who's tracking your cell phone? Probably more people than you're comfortable with. Working in a Guatemalan refugee camp, Paul Schmitt noticed an "IMSI catcher" at the entrance, presumably so authorities could track the residents' comings and going. These devices, also known as "Stingrays," are used by governments around the world(Opens in a new window) to track citizens.
"Commercial surveillance" is also now in the government's crosshairs, as the FTC now seeks comment on "the business of collecting, analyzing, and profiting from information about people."
The IMSI (international mobile subscriber identifier) is the code attached to your SIM card that lets the network know you're a subscriber in good standing. Thing is, that number lets your mobile provider track you, and it can give that data to partners or authorities if it wants. Even worse, third parties can set up Stingrays, and collect subscriber IDs and locations for their own purposes.
So along with ex-Googler Barath Raghavan, Schmitt founded Invisv, a startup dedicated to figuring out how to cloak its users' IMSIs. Its new "pretty good phone privacy" product, available for Android phones that have eSIM capability, combines a virtual carrier (using AT&T's network in the US) with special software that lets you churn your IMSI.
"We were hopeful this would be picked up by the [phone] companies. We approached the telecoms, and the response wasn't what we hoped for," Schmitt says. "We wanted to show this is actually possible."
The company also offers a two-hop VPN service for Android that costs $5/month, to hide your internet traffic. (Apple's iOS doesn't offer third-party developers the APIs needed to do IMSI switching.)
So Invisv offers a mobile service, provided
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