➡ Mobile phones are heavily monitored by big tech companies and governments, which can feel invasive. However, there are ways to reduce this surveillance. By not using a SIM card, your phone disconnects from the public switch telephone network (PSDN), reducing tracking. Also, using data only and a VPN can limit what information is visible to others. Remember, while phones are tracked, you can control what is seen by using apps for communication instead of calling and texting.
➡ Google and Apple track your location and app usage, and they link this data to your identity through your Google or Apple ID. This information, along with your contact list and phone number, is used to create a detailed profile of your activities. To protect your privacy, you can switch to a de-googled operating system, avoid using location services, and use a separate phone number for two-factor authentication. There are also services that offer anonymous phone numbers for added privacy.
➡ I’ve partnered with a mobile provider to offer privacy-focused solutions like multiple phone numbers and non-KYC options. Join us on Braxme for discussions and to explore our privacy products like Brax Mail, Brax Virtual Phone, and BICE VPN. We’re also launching BraxSim Unlisted, a secure SIM solution, and have hardware solutions like the Brax 3 phone and Brax Open Slate tablet available on ndgogo.com. Your support on Patreon, locals, and YouTube memberships helps us continue our work.

Your mobile phone is the most heavily surveilled device in the world. It is subjected to constant monitoring both by big tech, via the internet connection, and by the government through the cell service. In general, if you’re under active surveillance by your government, and particularly governments in the 5i countries, then you must assume that you cannot possibly use a phone. Even a secret agent will have very limited uses for a phone, and mostly it may be to appear like a normal person. John McAfee did not use a phone. Edward Snowden does not use a phone. While you might think that a phone is a risk only for the targeted person, for the average law-abiding citizen, the mass surveillance conducted on our phone traffic is out of control, and should make you feel uncomfortable.

Because if you do not do anything, everything you do on a distract, the absolute absence of privacy. Today, most of the location surveillance used in police dragness on ordinary people is done via the phone, and a lot of this information is even sold publicly, and the phone number is the primary identification now used to profile us on the internet. Big tech can’t observe all of our actions through the phone. Google can track every click you do on the internet, again, through the phone. Every single action on the phone network, whether it be a call or text, is filed away in multiple databases, quickly retrieved, and completely non-private.

Any privacy-conscious individual needs to be aware of what you can do to minimize this surveillance footprint. Can it be done? Yes. Fortunately, there are things you can do to minimize this tracking. If you want to discover what you should do, stay right there. The moment you put an ASIM card on your phone or activate an eSIM, then instantly your device becomes part of the surveillance infrastructure tied to the cell phone network. This is the price you pay for having a reachable phone number. If, for example, you never put a SIM or eSIM on your phone, then it is disconnected from the public switch telephone network, PSDN.

It’s really a simple rule. So at any moment, if you understand this, you can just disconnect your presence on the PSDN by disabling the SIM service. Unfortunately, that is possible on most phones. Obviously, this also disconnects you from the data side of the phone network, and you have no internet. But if you choose to connect the SIM-less phone to a Wi-Fi network, then it is still not connected to the PSDN, and that part of the surveillance cannot occur. Phones do have a built-in way to connect to the PSDN in an emergency. In the U.S., you dial 911, and the device will connect to the nearest tower, even if there’s no SIM card.

But, absent that, the phone will be quiet and will not emit cell signals until you put in a SIM card. The ID of the phone Your SIM card has an identifier called the IMSI, or International Mobile Subscriber Identity. And to connect to any cell phone network, this IMSI has to be announced by the phone. Once the phone connects to a carrier, the carrier specified by the SIM card, your phone identity is tied to the cell tower you connect to. This also identifies your general location. In the majority of cases, your SIM card is offered to you by your carrier only with KYC, or Know Your Customer Document.

In other words, you often tie your SIM card to your ID. This is then tied to your real name, address, and so on. If some entity like a carrier or a government needs to check out your actions on the phone network, it should be a simple matter to match IMSIs to your identity and then track your traffic on the PSDN databases. By law, the PSDN data is shared to government by CALEA, or the Communications Assistant for Law Enforcement Act. This means you are no more than a point-and-click away from someone being able to track every incoming and outgoing phone call in the contents of every single text message.

All normies have an MZ. The reality is that surveillance can be done both ways. Not only can you be tracked from your MZ, but it should also be possible to identify people with no MZ. Either you have a landline or voiceover IP line or absent that, you can easily be marked as a person of interest just because you have no MZ and thus can be classified as suspicious. I want you to understand this. Your cell phone is constantly emitting an MZ and some other network identifier like a MAC address. If you walk through a security and you emit no signal, then it means you have no phone.

And that would make me ask, why don’t you have a phone? Maybe you’re 90, but if you’re 30, it would look weird, right? I just want you to be aware of this and be thinking about it. This is why if I were a spy, I would carry a normal production phone with obvious expected apps on it so I don’t stand out. While it is expected that you would be emitting an MZ at all times, what is not obvious is what identity that MZ is associated to. And secondarily, just because you have a phone doesn’t mean you are forced to use the phone network or PSDN.

Perhaps you’re only using data and this is one way to limit the surveillance. The data side is actually encrypted typically. This is standard now with most internet access. Maybe in 2007, this was not as guaranteed, but today, browsers will pop a message if you’re not using encryption. So let’s say your MZ was acquired through a way that did not require KYC ID. Then your identity may not be immediately apparent. The more important tidbit I will share is that the PSDN can only record any activities if you use calling and texting. At that point, they can see who you’re talking to and who’s calling you.

But if you use only data, the only information that can be derived is that you’re going to a particular website. And if you’re on a VPN, even that is unknown. The only thing that will be known is that you’re using a VPN and what websites you’re visiting will be invisible. Limiting the PSDN Today is easy to minimize your calling traffic. Most people hardly call. Calls are often to and from family members and intended for immediate action. The larger amount of traffic to the average person is actually from texting or SMS. Texting is a pretty standard requirement for two-factor authentication with many platforms.

Because of this, it is pretty impossible to avoid getting texts completely. However, this is still doable using some hybrid techniques using voiceover IP, which I will discuss later. But what is important to note is that you control who calls you and who you call. How? Simple. You don’t give out the phone number. So on a line by line basis, you can designate a line to be known to the public, in which case you get calls and texts there. And there could be another line on your phone that no one else knows about and that gets no normal traffic.

When there is no traffic, there is obviously nothing to surveil. I will explore a multi-line strategy to see you later, but just keep this in the back of your head. If you stick to mostly using messaging apps like Signal on a phone, then that will use data and will not enter the PSDN. Thus, there would be no traffic to track. It should be a simple matter to move family to these alternate apps, right? So I encourage you to use apps to communicate instead of using calling and texting. But just understand this big picture statement.

While normies are expected to have a phone, what anyone can see you doing on it is completely under your control. While the carrier is in full control of cell traffic tracking, the data side is just an internet gateway. Mostly the carrier is limited to knowing the websites you visit and the amount of data you use at any given moment. Beyond that, it is really just a black box to them because of encryption. Adding a VPN as a complete layer of obscurity because even the websites you visit will not be visible, though they will know you’re using a VPN.

The phone OS, meaning Google Android or iOS, deals with the data or internet side of things, and this is the other side of the major danger. The big tech side. This, folks, is where the bulk of the surveillance data is generated from, and it is from the tracking built into the mobile operating systems. Both Apple and Google undisputedly do a tremendous amount of tracking. For example, the most intensive action is location tracking. While some people in the past would argue this point because they believe the disinformation from the likes of Apple, it is now well known that there is 24-7 tracking of all locations on these devices.

On an iPhone, the tracking is accurate up to inches, especially when there are air tags nearby. Outside of that, the normal tracking uses a technique called Wi-Fi triangulation indoors and GPS outdoors, which provides a location accurate to 6 feet. Publicly, the location database of Google is called the Google Sensor Vault, and it has been used in many court cases, so the cat is out of the bag. They can do geofencing and continuous location tracking. In addition to location tracking, both Google and Apple have app telemetry systems to track when you’re using an app and, of course, lock you down to using their app stores.

The worst part of the big tech infrastructure is the identity side because the fonts require the use of an identity, the Apple ID and the Google ID, and both in the case of iOS, then this is linked to a specific Google infrastructure. Using their wide reach of every single website via Google Analytics and Google Ads, they’re able to track your every click and match it to your Google ID. Meaning when it comes to big tech and what you do on the Internet, they have extremely specific knowledge. Then to ensure that you do not use multiple accounts and do not obscure your identity, the next approach is to require you to give a mobile phone number for two-factor authentication.

The contact list threat. The big tech surveillance infrastructure continues with the contact list threat. How this works is that many of the more dangerous apps like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and so on, capture the contact list of their users daily. This is so insidious because you can’t control it. While those of you who understand this will block access to your contact list, unfortunately, it is the normies who know you that exposed your information to big tech. So naturally, your name, phone number, and even some more private information like alternate phone numbers, addresses, and birthdays are sucked into the databases of the likes of Facebook.

And this creates a map of connections that I referred to as a relationship map. This is then tied to phone number identities. In addition to just the contact list data, the big tech companies like Facebook, Google, match these phone numbers to the data and the credit reporting databases like Equifax. They then have a clear indication of who you are the moment you sign up and who you’re connected to. This puts all your actions into a profile that can keep track of your activities, even if you use some alternate name. Fortunately, there are solutions to some of this and it depends on your willingness to put value on your privacy.

As a first step, you must abandon the use of Google Android or iOS on a phone you don’t want to be tracked. The typical solution that is well known is to switch to a de-googled OS or otherwise known as an open source OS based on Android open source project. There are several commercial solutions available like using Google pixels and manually flashing a de-googled OS on it such as EOD OS, Graphene OS, or Lineage OS. Or you can get phones that specifically are de-google like the Brax 3 phone which you can find on indiegogo.com.

But let me tell you why this works flawlessly. First of all, the Google phones have no connection to Google. All the code related to Google are not there. Secondly, these phones do not use a Google ID so they are not able to supply any kind of identification that can be used by Google for tracking. This means this disables very cleanly all the connections to location tracking, app telemetry, and mapping your actions all over the internet. This is simple and direct. At the moment, there is no other alternative. There is no way to modify an existing iPhone or production Google Android to disable the tracking.

That is impossible. The only option is to change the OS. Having said this, it is not necessarily a bad idea to have two phones. A production phone you can use rarely but proves you’re a normie and you’re a more private phone that you use more intensely. But this solution of changing OS is 100% effective and is likely the most important solution to privacy against big tech. When you are using a production iOS or Android phone, you unwittingly expose yourself to another threat which is the public dissemination of your location information. This is done via a large number of free apps that record your location and sell it to location aggregators.

This ends up in the hands of companies like Fog Data Science who can then market your location data or make it available to law enforcement. This location data is completely warrantless as it is acquired publicly. And in theory, the location data has no identity attached to it outside of your phone’s advertising ID. But it is trivial to use this to identify people because you can simply track the advertising ID until it goes home at night and then you have the address. And from that, you can match that data to credit reports to find the identity.

You can solve this even on a production phone if you never enable location for any app. But this is not possible for some of you, especially an app like Waze which you use for driving. But again here, the solution is a dig Google phone and the Google phones block this because they have no advertising ID. The big tech 2FA problem. To me, one of the biggest threats with phones is the two-factor authentication problem. You go to a big tech website like Google’s YouTube or Facebook and immediately they ask you for an SMS phone number for 2FA.

Then once you give them that number, it is matched to their contact list databases and they immediately know who you are and your identity is locked in. The solution is to give them a phone number for 2FA that is not known to your friends and family. The special number would be used only for 2FA. The effect of this is that the phone number cannot be matched to your actual identity since it will not appear in someone’s actual contact list. Or alternatively, it is a number used before and it appears to be someone else, which is actually a good thing, as long as it doesn’t point to your current identity.

Thus, this finally gives you pseudo anonymity. Solutions for phone number anonymity Beyond keeping information away from the phone network or PSDN, the phone number is now the new internet ID and aside from having a Google phone, this has become a top priority to protect. There are many solutions and alternatives I will discuss in detail, but this video will become too long so I will just summarize the approaches and then I will delve into more detail in another video. The general principle is that you need to partition your life into multiple phone numbers.

It is no longer possible to maintain a single number if you want any privacy. The way I would think of it is that one number is a public number that is attached to your real identity and this could be the same number you’ve always used. And this number will be in contact lists at Big Tech and will match the number at your bank, credit card reporting, bureaus, and government records. This is a number, though, you would never use for two-factor authentication. For that, you need a second number. There are a few choices here.

Now, some of my detractors will use this opportunity to tell you that I’m just trying to sell you something. In fact, until I came up with these solutions, there were no alternatives, so interpret as you wish. The safest and least expensive option is to use a voiceover IP service like Brax Virtual Phone. The service has no KYC, and since it is not a mobile number, there is no MD to track you on the PSDN. This could be used just for 2FA, and you would never reveal this to anyone else. This number can receive text, and you can see the text using any browser by going to the Braxme site.

It requires no phone. This is a popular service that I’ve offered now for a couple of years, and it’s definitely cheaper than any alternative. The disadvantage of this solution is that some sites, notably Metal Platforms, Google, and Discord, will not accept a voiceover IP number because they want a real identity, but it works for most other sites requiring 2FA. The more sophisticated option is to actually get another SIM card with a new line. The problem with this approach is that most carriers require KYC, and so that this will likely leak to the credit card bureaus.

The advantage of this line, though, is that it is completely a legit mobile line, and it will not be refused by any platform. It will be more expensive than a Brax Virtual Phone solution, though, and it will have an IMSI, so it is not as private. I’m going to be introducing an alternative solution here shortly, which is the Brax SIM Unlisted. What makes this solution stand out is that it is a SIM solution with no KYC. This gives you a real mobile phone number and is less expensive than your typical mobile line.

There will be solutions for the US and many countries in Europe. The Brax Virtual Phone solution is only for US and Canada, so this new Brax SIM Unlisted will finally provide a safe solution for countries like the UK and the EU. I have vetted this mobile provider and now have a partnership with my company. I’m happy to be continually looking for solutions for my followers and hopefully always looking for viable alternatives that are competitive in price. I’m going to discuss this in more detail when the infrastructure is finalized, which is shortly. In the meantime, the takeaway is still the same.

You need more than one phone number, and the best number is the one with no KYC, whether it is voice over IP or a SIM solution. Folks, I’m continuously searching for products and companies that I can either offer myself or partner with someone else because it is difficult to find good privacy solutions. First of all, to provide a platform for discussion where you can debate or discuss privacy issues, please join us on Braxme and share your knowledge about privacy or learn from others at the more advanced stage than you are.

On the store on Braxme, we have products that are available that we’ve created to provide privacy solutions. We have Brax mailed for identity protected email. We have Brax virtual phone for anonymous voice over IP phone numbers. We have BICE VPN to protect your IP address and DNS data. I’m also introducing you to BraxSim Unlisted, a privacy-focused SIM solution. Watch out for this on the Braxme site. I will provide a link to the signup page for this service when it is ready. On the hardware side, we’ve been creating many solutions. These are being crowdfunded on ndgogo.com and managed by a sister company, Braxtech.net.

The Brax 3 phone is now on a second batch and should be shipping by the time this video is released. And the new Brax Open Slate is the new Android and Linux tablet which is expected to ship in the fall. If you want to learn more about these products, please go to Braxtech.net and they are sold on ndgogo.com. Thank you again to those who support us on Patreon, locals, and YouTube memberships. Your kindness is appreciated and encourages me to carry on. See you next time. Thank you for watching. [tr:trw].

See more of Rob Braxman Tech on their Public Channel and the MPN Rob Braxman Tech channel.