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Comment by treetalker | Hacker News Reader

If anyone uses this and could tell us about your experience, please do!

I use Cape every day on my iPhone. The service is excellent, and the security features haven't ever interfered with my use of the phone. They have a convenient mobile app for setting up extra features like the IMSI rotation and getting support. As a tech savvy user, it matches what I want.

I'm a target for a variety of things, and knowing that no one can SIM swap me is worth the subscription alone. The SS7 protections, encrypted voicemail, secondary numbers, IMSI rotation, etc are all a bonus.

You would be better off hosting your “phone number “at Twilio and then forwarding that number to a throwaway SIM card that nobody knows the number to.

Your “phone number “that people interact with cannot be hijacked with SS7 because it’s not a real number… you’re immune to sim swaps … And you can Jettison your physical phone and SIM card at any time with no penalty.

As a bonus, because your actual phone number is now programmable you can do interesting things like set up a SMS firewall. You can, for instance, collapse all incoming text messages to ascii-256. Or truncate their overall length. Or CC your incoming SMS to a dedicated mailbox.

I have operated like this since 2016. I have no idea what my physical SIM phone number is and neither does anybody else.

I’m a skeptic. It’s only been a handful of years since Anom was backdoored by the Feds. The surveillance data provided by cell phones is simply too good to let someone work around it

https://www.vice.com/en/article/anom-backdoor-fbi-years-of-a...

This Anom comp comes up a lot. It's super hard to prove a negative, so no matter many how times I say "Cape is not a honeypot," the critics will just respond "that is exactly what a honeypot would say."

We're working on some ideas to address this with audits etc, but it will always be tough. However, if you like the idea, and like the features, then maybe it is worth your time to do the work and get comfortable with the company. Because we're the only ones providing some of these features, and we have a lot more in the hopper still to come. I hope we can win your trust at some point.

I have no particular reason to trust that you aren't a honeypot but I'd like to point out that I also have no particular reason to trust that any other cell service provider isn't. In fact given the recent e911 location data sale scandal I generally assume that all of them are.

Even if it turned out that you were in fact a honeypot, protection against SIM swapping and encrypted voicemail presumably both provide security benefits regardless.

It's similar to the situation with VPN providers. The provider could literally be the NSA themselves and I'd _still_ most likely see security benefits from using it (unless the NSA happens to be my adversary of course).

Thanks, it's a good point.

But to be clear, you DO actually know that other cell service providers are selling your data to law enforcement:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/oct/25/att-secretl...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/09/court-rejects-ve...

Also, the reporter who broke the Anom story has written about Cape a couple of times: https://www.404media.co/i-dont-own-a-cellphone-can-this-priv...

https://www.404media.co/privacy-telecom-cape-introduces-disa...

You don't have to prove a negative, but if you want real trust from actually paranoid people, you will have to give up keys to the kingdom and work hard for it.

All your software/hardware would need to be open source, you would need to be regularly audited by neutral third-parties, actively work with the community to provide paranoia-level ongoing transparency reports and continuous improvements that the community wants to see, be willing to adopt many suggestions given by smart people, and just in general stop using your words to tell people you're serious, and use your actions to show it.

If someone says they are skeptical of XYZ, ask them what they would accept as proof, and then provide it.

Good luck! It's a tough sell and some people won't accept that there are people from the defense sector that really care about the Constitution. Transparency is proly your best friend. But once you sign a Qualcom or carrier NDA, you are pretty tied-up as far as open-sourcing things or transparency, I'd imagine. Still, keep up the good fight!

The issue I’m having is that the morals of someone who would work for a planteir and people who would be in the military are not the morals of people who are advocates, or even might have a moral understanding, of the importance of privacy. I can imagine you creating the service because you see the market demanding this privacy, but what bothers me is that you worked for these companies in the first place.

Like others explained here, it’s amazing that you didn’t know these problems existed before you worked for at Plantier. If you could explain your migration from delusion to insight in a personal way of that might help me a bit more. In fact, if you said Plantier was an evil company, I might have even more faith.

If someone elsestarted this company who had a long history in privacy outside of the government, my take would be a lot different. In my humble opinion, I think you don’t really care about privacy. You’re just taking advantage of a market niche. And what can I say but that’s capitalism so good luck.

It would be better if you used your inside knowledge to fight for laws banning these practices by all the telcos.

If you're not doing "fed" level shit and just don't wanna make your petty shit trivial for the locals to dredge up that's probably fine.

Like they're not gonna burn that kind of capability over tax evasion, state civil law violations, etc.

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