Hey all, I'm one of the creators of BurnerPhone, and just wanted to leave a comment with a few facts about the product.<p>We weren't really planning on launching this thing so quickly (we planned on making improvements to the site, etc. and launching in the next couple of weeks) -- but since all the press about the NSA / phone stuff came out it seemed like a good time to put our MVP online.<p>Anyhow, we're basically trying to provide our users with a secure-as-possible communication device that allows them to remain as anonymous as possible. Yes -- the government can definitely collect call data and SMS data, but by using different devices and SIM cards (phone numbers) you can abstract away all but the most difficult to track details: your voice, your writing style (sms messages).<p>Using a BurnerPhone allows you to make phone calls and send SMS messages that won't be linked back to your by your telco billing records.<p>In regards to how we work:<p>- These phones come with unlimited talk and text for 30 days, nationwide coverage.<p>- We piggyback off of tons of US carriers, so depending on where you're located, you'll be connected to a different cellular network.<p>- You can recycle these phones (we have a lot of plans with this in the future).<p>I'd love to get some feedback from you guys, really respect HN and your opinions.
Why doesn't someone just built a Tor hidden service that is an interface to the Twilio (or similar) API? Sign up with Bitcoin, get a phone number and then send/receive SMS and send/receive calls using DAP/getUserMedia (html5 mic + audio) in a web browser.<p>Using a physical cell phone still leaves a trace of the purchase, shipping, physical call location, cell site pings, etc. Plus in a lot of jurisdictions it is now a legal requirement to verify identity and adress with issuing phone numbers.<p>Using a Tor hidden service (+VPN, etc.) I could be anybody anywhere in the world. Less bits figured out.<p>edit: apologies if this is hijacking the thread
I'm curious about two things:<p>1.) How do you comply with E911 laws that require addresses for the end user? Whatever carrier you deal with will likely terminate any contracts it has to, upon discovery.<p>2.) How does the shipment process work? You may delete all records of the purchase transaction, but you're still shipping via UPS/FedEx/USPS/Etc and all of those maintain records on source/destination addresses and various other shipping details (size/weight/approx cost).
The government said "trust us" too. I'm not entirely sure why anybody who wants to buy an untraceable phone would go to a website run by an unknown person to buy one. There are so many ways that this could go wrong for the phone purchaser.<p>I'm thinking either this is a spoof site where in a week's time you'll just say "Ha! Look at all this private information you just gave a complete stranger!" or it's a government-run honeypot.
Other people have commented on the payment issue - I'm glad you're looking into bitcoin.<p>I'd be worried about delivery, too. I know you say you destroy customer information immediately, but if I'm truly paranoid I'm not going to trust that statement - I'd rather pay someone on craigslist to buy a bunch of prepaid phones for me.<p>I'm just brainstorming, but would it be possible to set up some sort of physical tor/mixmaster style forwarding that would keep the final destination of the phone from ever being known to you? I'm not entirely sure how that would work, and it would probably be open to abuse, but it's an interesting thought.<p>Also, could you consider posting something like rsync.net's warrant canary?<p><a href="http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt" rel="nofollow">http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt</a><p>It's not perfect, but it is a nice touch.
> Every time you make a purchase we'll package and ship your order, then destroy all transaction records in our system. We make it impossible to give or share your information with anyone.<p>Come on. There is absolutely no way you can convince anybody of this fact. It is impossible (and I mean this in the mathematical sense) to prove that you have no record of how it was purchased or where the phone went.
Whats your moral stance on your business? There are a lot of legitimate uses for your product, but its also (for obvious reasons) very attractive to people involved in criminal activities. Will you be putting any measures in place to counteract this?<p>For example, lets say you were regularly getting orders to a foreign country which is known to be a hot spot for terrorism. Then, you have the police knocking on your door, because there has been a major terror threat in a US city, and they need to track the terrorists phones.<p>I can guess the answer, but just want to make the point there are usually 2 sides to an anonymous service like this.
I know this has been said before....but I just couldn't help but chuckle at the irony of a "completely anonymous" phone, only able to be bought with a credit card :|
Anything but cash/bitcoin leaves too much of a trail. Just because you destroy your records doesn't mean your merchant bank does. Nor does it mean my bank will.
If you need to coordinate your criminal activities all The Wire-like, why not just use some form of encrypted communication using the phone you already have? Maybe just get one for criminal activity only to be extra safe? Aren't all these problems solved by some 2048-bit encryption? I guess the phone company can see which IP you're making a connection too, but that doesn't seem like much. Why do we have to waste this much perfectly good hardware just to be anonymous?
Isn't this service just taking advantage of the situation at hand? This is like offering a 'premium' burner phone, but burner phones aren't supposed to come with nice unlimited plans and etc.<p>You could get a Tracfone with some starter minutes for $10 and a 50 minute card for $10 with cash. The 50 minutes actually becomes 100 minutes due to Tracfone's 2x minutes promo.
<a href="http://www.tracfone.com/phones.jsp" rel="nofollow">http://www.tracfone.com/phones.jsp</a>
Yes, this isn't 'unlimited' usage, but the whole point of a burner phone is to use it for one time communication, NOT for normal, regular comms over a 30 day period. You're just asking to be tracked if you did that anyway.<p>Seems like you would just be paying for a burner phone in a pretty box and pretty service when you could go out and buy one yourself.<p>Also, the burnerphone.us whois indicates that it was registered less than a month ago in May 2013.
What's going on in USA? Why does you care so much about privacy?<p>You look like crazy paranoid to me, as if you all are trying to hide something from a criminal or a law enforcement.<p>I bet there are lots of North Americans complaining of this PRISM an Verizon thing, but at the same time is using Foursquare and every cool internet location-based mobile app you also created.<p>There is a dictate in my country that says (in other words) that "If you are innocent then you have nothing to fear."<p>This BurnerPhone service would be used only for criminals in my country. I see no use for innocent people. This is too much even for people that have something non-criminal action to hide, like cheating your spouse.<p>If you have fear of your government watching you, then it's better to move to another country or live like a monkey in the forest. Burn your social security card and go live as if you didn't exist for your government.
These types of services might just turn out to be the "killer app" that pushes bitcoin out of collector space and into currency use.<p>People will already be committed to going out of their way to obtain extra privacy. Figuring out how to use bitcoin for the transaction will seem like little additional effort.
Sorry to say but you still have to pay by credit card (huge trail), and even if you use bitcoin, you still have to have the phone delivered somewhere, and to someone.
So what happens when the government (or IRS) persuades you to not destroy transaction logs with a $5 wrench?
<a href="http://xkcd.com/538&#x2F" rel="nofollow">http://xkcd.com/538&#x2F</a>;
Out of curiosity, did you consult with attorneys before launch? I'm completely unqualified to answer the question, but I would think there's a possibility you could land yourself in a bit of a pickle if you shipped one that was later impounded in a law enforcement operation. It seems clear that you wouldn't have known it would be used illegally, but that wouldn't stop someone from ruining your month.<p>(Congrats, of course)
Although, I do see potential for this, pay with credit/debit card? It will be traceable who do I call, also it will show up in my card records. Also, there is going to be some record where it was sent. It will be probably sufficient for most users, but not all.<p>I have it a little bit better, but not perfect.<p>For 15 euros I will get phone + prepaid card. I can buy it from any local gas station or kiosk or mall, I can have some homeless to buy it for me.<p>Prepaid over here means, it is as simple as old school phone cards. No name, no bank accounts, no contract, no credit/debit card. Cash and goodbye.<p>I can also allow roaming just by sending sms to specific number(if it is not allowed), it will work almost everywhere(although the prices will be pretty high)<p>(source(sorry, translator don't work with https
<a href="https://www.elisa.ee/et/Eraklient/konekaart/konekomplekt/elisa-konekomplekt" rel="nofollow">https://www.elisa.ee/et/Eraklient/konekaart/konekomplekt/eli...</a>)
If this company were not in the USA I might have confidence in their product being truly anonymous. All they've done is serve as a concentrating function for the NSA. You're far better off buying a phone for cash from a different 7-11 each month.<p>Perhaps this might be a business opportunity for the North Koreans?
Whenever I see something like this come up, my brain automatically screams: Honeypot!<p>Services such as these attract the paranoid and the criminal in large enough amounts that they make great ways to catch criminals without having to do any leg work whatsoever.<p>Sell burners, track all of them via GPS/monitor all calls/use microphone to record real life conversations at random times then use said data to bring people down.<p>The same could be said for bitcoin exchangers, former liberty reserve exchangers, seed boxes, private VPNs and a host of other "secure" services. I'm not positively stating that any of these kinds of services are actually honeypots, but it probably should be something that one considers before using them for more nefarious purposes.<p>Makes you wonder what you can really trust. Probably nothing.<p>Honeypots all round! No wait, it's a trap!
Is it really possible to completely anonymize an online purchase? Like others have said, the sheer act of buying something online which must be shipped somewhere is going to leave some trace. Unless both money and phone are transferred via a special courier (preferably in one those suitcases that you handcuff to yourself), a dedicated surveillance effort would be able to discover the customer's identity eventually. I'm sure you guys are well-intentioned, but, honestly, if I was paranoid enough to need one of these, I sure as heck wouldn't be comfortable buying it online. I'd probably just buy a cheap pre-paid cellphone from a corner store using cash.
How does this work? I thought the gov't required identifying information to be gathered when selling a cellular phone?<p>What are the regulations?<p>If the gov't wants to track down the owner of a phone, what do you do? Just say that you don't have that information?
Do all the phones look the same? Because if so, "If you'd like to recycle your Burner when you're done using it, just throw it into any cell phone disposal box (these can usually be found at office supply stores)."<p>Ummmm.
Why is this $75? The cheapest phone around is about $20, the Nokia 105 comes to mind for example. Add some dollars for the calls, texts and your margin $75 seems a bit steep.
Can someone provide a few examples of legal use cases for this type of thing? I understand people who want to protect their personal information, but these are going way out of their way to actively conceal their personal information. I just don't know why that would be a priority unless you are trying to hide something. I am not usually in the "you have nothing to fear unless you are hiding something" camp, but these seem pretty extreme.
The old adage goes, "Don't mine for gold — sell pickaxes to the miners."<p>I guess the modern adaptation is, "Don't deal drugs — sell phones to the drug dealers."
Except the NSA already gets all visa/mastercard transactions directly from their network.<p>Destroying the transaction on the vendor side is useless.
even <a href="https://www.burnerphone.us&#x2F" rel="nofollow">https://www.burnerphone.us&#x2F</a>; is informing google (and a few other sites) when you visit.
If anybody needs true, total anonymity it's worth reading this paper before buying any cell phone: <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3607247/pdf/srep01376.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3607247/pdf/srep...</a><p>The paper shows that 95% of cell phone subscribers are personally identifiable from VERY little spatio-temporal information.<p>Another issue is that an upstream vendor could easily provide the government with the phone IMEIs and SIM IMSIs that they supply to BurnerPhone, without disclosing this to BurnerPhone. This would create a pool of phones that are self-identified as high-value surveillance targets.<p>If I was in charge of identifying miscreants for a nasty regime, I'd also watch for SIM card changes (an IMEI whose IMSI changes on a regular basis), and I'd especially look for cliques of handsets that showed the same SIM-changing behavior. As such, I can't help but wonder if swapping SIM cards might generate unwanted attention.
What a ripoff. I can get a cheap throwaway phone with unlimited minutes/text for less than $50. I also can buy it with cash at any mom and pop cellular phone shop. I don't need I.D. and I can use any fucking name I want. This phone needs a fucking credit card and an address to deliver. Might as well put up a fucking sign saying dumbest criminal in the world! Leaving a paper trail all over the damn place.