Nicholas Merrill has spent his career fighting government surveillance. But he would really rather you didn’t call what he’s selling now a “burner phone.”
Yes, he dreams of a future where anyone in the US can get a working smartphone—complete with cellular coverage and data—without revealing their identity, even to the phone company. But to call such anonymous phones “burners” suggests that they’re for something illegal, shady, or at least subversive. The term calls to mind drug dealers or deep-throat confidential sources in parking garages.
With his new startup, Merrill says he instead wants to offer cellular service for your existing phone that makes near-total mobile privacy the permanent, boring default of daily life in the US. “We're not looking to cater to people doing bad things,” says Merrill. “We're trying to help people feel more comfortable living their normal lives, where they're not doing anything wrong, and not feel watched and exploited by giant surveillance and data mining operations. I think it’s not controversial to say the vast majority of people want that.”
That’s the thinking behind Phreeli, the phone carrier startup Merrill launched today, designed to be the most privacy-focused cellular provider available to Americans. Phreeli, as in, “speak freely,” aims to give its user a different sort of privacy from the kind that can be had with end-to-end encrypted texting and calling tools like Signal or WhatsApp. Those apps hide the content of conversations, or even, in Signal’s case, metadata like the identities of who is talking to whom. Phreeli instead wants to offer actual anonymity. It can’t help government agencies or data brokers obtain users’ identifying information because it has almost none to share. The only piece of information the company records about its users when they sign up for a Phreeli phone number is, in fact, a mere ZIP code. That’s the minimum personal data Merrill has determined his company is legally required to keep about its customers for tax purposes.
By asking users for almost no identifiable information, Merrill wants to protect them from one of the most intractable privacy problems in modern technology: Despite whatever surveillance-resistant communications apps you might use, phone carriers will always know which of their customers’ phones are connecting to which cell towers and when. Carriers have frequently handed that information over to data brokers willing to pay for it—or any FBI or ICE agent that demands it with a court order