Q&A: The Best Private Cell Carriers
Added 2025-01-16 03:52:51 +0000 UTCQ&A209: What other private cell carriers exist aside from Mint Mobile? Should you use Bitlocker or Veracrypt on Windows? How can you shred old data effectively? Can you safely remove a car's modem? How was Henry's time in Vienna?
Welcome to the Surveillance Report Q&A - featuring Techlore & The New Oil answering your questions about privacy and security.
Video Version: https://youtu.be/tBkIQP8BIxA
00:00 Introduction
00:29 Private Cell Carriers
04:45 Private Apple Pay Options
06:42 Bitlocker vs Veracrypt
08:00 Secure Data Deletion
10:08 Removing a Car's Modem
12:57 Henry's Thoughts on Vienna
Jonah Aragon - "Intro to digital wallet privacy & security"
---
π Go ahead and leave some questions below for us to look at for SR210 this weekend! (Note: We record on Friday nights in the US, so it's highly recommended to leave all questions by noon on Friday in the US)
It can be about a specific story, a general question about privacy/security, a question about the world, a question you tried last week, or anything else. Due to time restraints we can't promise that we'll get to yours, but we appreciate all of them!
To receive these posts via RSS, get your own custom link using these instructions.
Comments
Hey Parker, I think you must've posted this RIGHT after we wrote down questions. If you want, you can add it to the next Q&A and we'll answer them next time. Good questions! -N
Surveillance Report
2025-01-25 17:27:55 +0000 UTCFirst question. Lots of sites require a mobile number for registration these days. Do you have any tips on creating junk accounts in these cases when you live in a country that requires to show your government ID to get a prepaid card or subscription? Are there cheap ways to do that? For example, maybe getting a temporary phone number somehow and then reusing that phone number for several services like Google, Microsoft and so on? Second. Is there any privacy related thing you are looking forward to in 2025? Maybe a new product or feature or some new strategy that you are planning to implement this year?
Parker
2025-01-19 22:47:02 +0000 UTCAlternatives to JMP.chat with multiple numbers & unlimited talk time
Khalid Duel
2025-01-19 21:48:35 +0000 UTCHey guys, curious what your thoughts are on private home ownership. The Extreme Privacy method seems like it will be very difficult if not impossible for most people. Is online data removal a good enough solution for most threat models? It won't deter anyone who is looking through property records, but should make it harder to find your address from a Google search of your name. Cheers!
Number Six
2025-01-18 21:22:20 +0000 UTCSecond time's a charm G'day guys, coming round for another orbit! Great content across all the channels lately by the way lads, keep it up. This one is a two-parter but both are Firefox related and also open questions for the community/forum as well. 1. Pretty diehard Firefox user here, have been for as long as FF launched essentially. It's not my only browser but it's my main for sure (Mullvad crew). It has a ton of super useful features, great add-on extension support and granular control missing from other browsers owned by data motivated companies, likely for just that reason. The Firefox account feature syncing all my bookmarks/tabs and extensions across every machine I run (I have about 4 or 5) including my portable FF version has become an indispensible component in my day to day workflow, so much so that I can run just about everything I need for my job, personal accounts and multiple projects through web apps and clients with my password manager integrated. Absolute godsend. That all being said, we've all seen the wack ass 24 months the company has had with management restructures and being bought by an ad company, which has me really worried about the future of the browser and Mozilla's motivations. I'm now forced to really think about an exit strategy as a result, should I need to bail. Have you guys come across a similar browser that can be hardened like this, but retains the functionality of account synchronisation either through direct integration or an installable extension? I'm pretty entrenched in this way of working because of it's (mostly) killer balance of privacy, flexibility and ease, but it'd be a damned shame to have to abandon it if Mozilla really does heel turn and become what it originally sought to destroy... and 2... Is it just me, or has anyone else using FF in the last 2-ish months fired it up only to notice extensions to do with ad blocking or sponsor skipping had mysteriously uninstalled themselves?? And I'm not talking like, all the extensions you had just vanishing, I mean specifically just the ones designed for blocking ads and sponsored content only. Three or four times now I've opened FF (on several of my machines, mind you) to find that uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock had disappeared, and only those two. I have others but it was just them that vanished. I looked this up and there are a smattering of Reddit posts from various years reporting similar behaviour but they all seemed to be caused by various bugs in older browser versions or the extension itself having a weird time after an update. This feels different... surreptitious and deliberate, and conveniently timed considering Mozilla's ad-company acquisition. I'm no conspiracy theorist by any stretch but that's some correlation that warrants a bit of digging. Also let me into the Signal group already! Stay private homies βοΈπ
Satellite
2025-01-17 01:32:42 +0000 UTCThree opinion questions about choices between alternatives: Do you think your own hardware (e.g. nextbox from NitroKey) or a VPS is a better choice for NextCloud? On the one hand, it seems that your own hardware gives you more privacy/ownership for the contents, but that is not necessary to achieve the basic privacy of data and usage analytics that NextCloud apps offer over the analogous ones from mainstream tech companies. However, a VPS may be more reliable in terms of uptime and not having to worry about extra attack surface from opening up your home network to more connections from outside and then having to worry about staying on top of zero-days in whatever inbound VPN tool you would use. Do you think Gnome or KDE is a better desktop environment in terms of privacy and security? Do you think an on-device VPN or a proxy network like SPN from Safing is a better way to achieve internet connection privacy? (Assuming you would have an always-on VPN on your router; so, privacy from ISP is not a factor.) What do you think about Safing's argument that VPNs were never meant as a privacy tool, but as a means to securely access internal company networks, and that inherently limits what they can do for privacy? What do you think about Simplified Privacy argument that many of the websites you may be connecting to could be hosted in the same datacentre as your VPN provider, which could significantly lower how much privacy your VPN provides, and have you used the proxy-based VPN from Simplified Privacy?
David Johnson
2025-01-16 11:21:43 +0000 UTC
![J.A.X [Ai art]](https://xaiju.com/istorage/100248.jpg)
