Cape runs its own mobile core, all of the software necessary to route messages, authenticate users, and basically be a telecom. Ultimately, this gives Cape the control to do more privacy-enhancing things, such as periodically give its phones a new IMEI—a unique identifier for the phone—and new IMSI—a similar identifier, but one attached to the SIM card (or eSIM in Cape’s case). The phone can also give itself a new mobile advertising identifier (MAID), which is an identifier advertising ecosystems and apps use to track peoples’ web browsing activity and is sometimes linked to their physical movement data. Cape said the IMEI and MAID rotation is handled by the custom Cape handset, which runs standard up-to-date Android.
Cape lets users create bundles of these identifiers, called “personas”, then cycle through them at different points. This means that during some attacks, a Cape phone may look like a different phone each time.
Well, this is a very interesting phone. Whether governments really want their citizens (or their terrorists or child molesters) to have these devices is another story…
The author also raises an intriguing point about why has AT&T and other phone networks not offered something like this before. The easy answer is wire-tapping requirements (remember the NSA vs PGP encryption in the 1990’s). Google could have offered encrypted email too if it wished, but reading our mail helps fuel its advertising business.
But way more shocking in the linked article, was the statement by the author that they have not owned a smartphone since 2017! I get that you can do a lot on your desktop (like I do), but even I realised that I needed that banking app to do 2FA when approving payments, or SMS for some sites still to authenticate access, and needed Waze to navigate through ever denser traffic, etc. Even the poorest of the poor in our country now at least have a feature phone.
I find it difficult enough telling many people, no, really, I don’t have WhatsApp when they want to send receipts to me via WhatsApp.
See https://www.404media.co/i-dont-own-a-cellphone-can-this-privacy-focused-network-change-that