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Comment by hga | Hacker News Reader

Errr, this sounds great as long as you limit your use to only one phone call or text message. Not long after that traffic analysis (what's enabled by capture of what sounds like the vast majority of the nation's telephone metadata as we gather is happening) will connect you to those you phone, making the apparent gains illusory.

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If you keep the phone turned off when you're not making calls and call from random locations in some big city, the GPS location data won't be very useful. For example, "this phone was used to make calls from a few scattered parks in Washington DC" doesn't really help to track down who leaked some item of classified information. Using the phone from your house or workplace even once could be a dead giveaway, so if you're security-conscious enough to want to have an untraceable phone, you would have to use it in the way I described.

So, since the government is indeed collecting an enormous amount of data -- it definitely makes it 'harder' to stay truly anonymous -- but this is a much more anonymous solution than anything else as you are making it as difficult as possible:

- New phone numbers. - Different cell signal piggyback depending on where you're located. - 30 day cell tower location tracking / SMS storage / phone call storage -- so in the worst case scenario you've got 30 days of conversation / messages stored.

If an entity wanted to track YOU, they'd have to do voice analysis of every call in the country / region, look for specific writing patterns / keywords in your sms messages, and then try to match things up (this would be really difficult, even with lots of information to go from).

Anyhow, it's definitely not a perfect solution, but one that really helps protect privacy.

You should add a way to "recycle" the used phones. Maybe a trade in program?

1. Making it even more secure and harder to track. One phone can be used by many people.

2. Keep cost down for the physical device.

We're actually working on all of the above right now.

We ended up rushing to get this to market due to the press news on the subject, so we ended up leaving out the things above -- but those are coming in the next week or two :)

The web site mentions that there will be a way to get phones and SIMs separately, so you could discard the SIM and keep the phone.

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