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What Is a Burner Phone, and When Should You Use One?

• Data 01/03/2021
• Autor george zaharia
• -7
• 503

A “burner phone” is a cheap, prepaid mobile phone that you can destroy or discard when you no longer need it. In popular media, criminals often use burner phones to evade detection by authorities. You might use a burner phone for privacy reasons, as a last resort, or during an emergency. A “burner SIM” is a related term, and refers to a cheap, prepaid SIM card that you can insert into another phone. You may plan on only using the SIM card for a limited period of time and not linking it to your real identity.

What Is a Burner?

A burner phone is a cheap, prepaid mobile phone that the owner generally doesn’t intend to use long term. These phones have traditionally been purchased with cash to avoid any kind of paper trail that would tie the phone number to an individual.

The term was popularized in the hit 2002 HBO series The Wire, where “burners” were used to avoid detection by authorities. Once a number was suspected of being compromised, the device was discarded or “burned” so that the trail would go cold. Since the rise of iPhones and Android devices, burners are more commonly referred to as “feature phones” or “dumb phones,” since the smartphones of today didn’t exist in the early 2000s. While the term “burner phone” is still common, SIM cards could also be used in such a manner.

Instead of purchasing an entirely new device, a burner SIM can be used in a smartphone to switch between numbers for a variety of reasons. Some smartphones can even accommodate more than one SIM at a time for this purpose. With that in mind, some of the applications of a burner phone rely solely on having a second dedicated device you can use.

You might use a burner phone or a SIM to protect your identity. If you can manage to procure a handset or SIM card that isn’t linked to your real-world identity, you can use the number without the risk of being identified.

There are all sorts of reasons that someone might want to remain anonymous. Maybe you’re phoning in an anonymous tip to an employer. Maybe you would like to use a secure messaging service like Signal or Telegram without disclosing your primary phone number. Maybe you’re trying to avoid giving your main phone number to marketers who will likely send you follow-up messages—like when you’re viewing a real estate listing or looking for insurance quotes.

Since burner phones are feature phones, they are severely limited in their abilities. Most lack cameras or access to a modern browser, and are instead limited to phone calls and text messaging. Since they are relatively lightweight devices, they have excellent battery life, too.

Many such devices will last for days on a single charge, and sometimes even months if you use the battery sparingly. This makes burner phones ideal for use in an emergency. They are often found in emergency survival kits since they can be charged and turned off until they are required. A burner phone is a spare phone with long battery life that doesn’t need an expensive cell phone plan—what’s not to like?

A Burner Doesn’t Guarantee Anonymity

If you’re buying a burner phone for privacy reasons that extend beyond simply using the number to send anonymous Signal messages or avoiding spam, be aware that no cell phone provides you with true anonymity. It’s all about your “threat model”—what threats are you trying to protect your privacy from?

Just think about the process of getting a burner phone from the store. Let’s say that you drive to a store, buy the burner phone with a credit card, drive home, and turn it on. In the process of this: If you took your normal phone with you, your cellular carrier will know that you were at the store at the time the phone was purchased. License plate cameras on the route may have captured your license plate and recorded your movements. A camera in the store may have recorded you buying the phone. Your credit card company will have a record of you buying the phone. When you turn the phone on at home, the cellular carrier your phone uses will have a pretty good idea of where your home address is.

And if you carry your burner phone and normal phone at the same time and both are powered on, anyone looking at cellular phone records can get a pretty good idea that those phones are owned by the same person.

Yes, that’s a lot of ways that you could be traced by an adversary with serious resources. If you’re really trying to evade government authorities—well, good luck. You’ll need it. On the other hand, if you just want a new phone number that isn’t directly and easily linked to your identity by the companies you deal with and the people you call, that’ll do just fine.

And if you’re not looking for anonymity and just want a secondary cell phone with long battery life for use in emergencies, this doesn’t really matter.

If you’re really looking for anonymity, how far you want to go in anonymizing your purchase is up to you. You could ask someone else to buy it for you, or ask them to purchase you a gift card, which you then might use to buy the phone. You could also use cash in person. For the sake of anonymity, you probably want to avoid using your credit or debit card, so purchasing from an online retailer is probably not the best idea.

If you’re only purchasing a burner to throw into a survival kit or to keep in the car for emergencies, you can comb the web for the best deals without worrying about privacy implications. Amazon, eBay, or your preferred local service provider are great places to start.

What About Google Voice and Other Services?

If you’re simply looking for a second number that you can use to call and text from a computer, or to use with a service like Signal or Telegram, consider VoIP services. Google Voice, Skype, and other internet telephony providers can give you a number that you can use for basic texting and calling.

Google Voice only works in the U.S., but it’s free and easy to sign up for. You can register a new Google Account to use with your new number and take precautions like hiding your IP address using a VPN. Other providers exist, but they will likely charge you for a number (and that may require linking your card).

If you’re using a burner for privacy reasons, make sure that you take appropriate steps to distance your identity from your purchase. If your interest in a burner is purely for emergency or backup use, make sure that you charge the phone before you stow it (and consider an AA battery charger). Wondering how you can charge your burner while away from a power outlet? Learn how to charge your phone in the middle of nowhere. If you’re wondering how police have tackled this phenomenon in the past, consider watching The Wire.

Disconnect Your Smart TV from the Internet to Stop Tracking

• Data 01/03/2021
• Autor george zaharia
• -10
• 439

Many TVs have “automated content recognition” technology that detects what you’re watching—even if you’re watching OTA TV or an old VHS tape—and informs marketers.

When this feature is enabled—and it’s probably enabled by default, or after a prompt that really encourages you to enable it without explaining it properly—your smart TV will monitor your watching habits and home phone. To do so, your smart TV will capture sections of video, snippets of audio, still images, or some combination of the three, and upload the data to a “listening post,” as AdExchanger’s guide for marketers explains it.

Even if you never touch your smart TV’s software and you just play video games from a console, stream with an Apple TV, or connect a PC via HDMI, your smart TV is likely watching and phoning home. What do the marketers do with this data? As AdExchanger puts it: “Once the data has been collected, TV analytics companies ingest ACR data and combine it with other data sets to make it more accurate and usable.”

In other words, data about what you’re doing on your TV is combined with other sources of data. These could include your web browsing history, search history, product purchases, and credit card transaction data. That data can then be used to build a more complete profile on you and your TV habits to better serve you targeted ads.

“You Are in Control!”

Of course, this monitoring isn’t happening against anyone’s will! That would be unethical. All the people who have this feature enabled on their TVs are surely informed consumers making an informed decision to share their data with marketers. For example, on a Roku smart TV, you have to head to Settings > Privacy > Smart TV Experience and disable “From TV Inputs” to deactivate ACR features.

We’re sure that all those Roku TV users out there understand exactly what this option does, right? The majority of Roku TV users all really want marketers to know exactly what they’re watching at all times.

That’s one perspective. Here’s another one:

TV manufacturers are only getting away with this by making ACR-related options confusing and buried, counting on TV customers not knowing that their televisions are even capable of this. Case in point: Vizio paid out a $17 million settlement after it was sued for making these options confusing and misleading. Of course, Vizio never admitted that it did anything wrong.

Finally, let’s face it: Smart TVs are cheaper than dumb TVs because of this data collection. Roku makes its money from ads and paid video content, not from selling hardware.

Consumer Reports has a good guide to turning off ACR and other snooping features on smart TVs from a wide variety of brands.

Just Disconnect Your Smart TV and Be Done with It

We could go on about other “features” you might not like, like the interactive advertisements Roku sometimes slips into cable TV programs. But honestly, what’s the point? Why not just prevent the smart TV software from phoning home in the first place?

To do so, just cut off your smart TV’s internet connection. If the TV is plugged into your network via an Ethernet cable, unplug it. If it’s connected to Wi-Fi, have your TV forget the Wi-Fi network. If your TV can’t connect to the network, it can’t phone home. When you get a new smart TV, consider not even connecting it to the network. You probably can’t avoid buying a smart TV, so this at least lets you treat a smart TV as if it were a traditional “dumb TV.” Problem solved!

Of course, this isn’t an ideal solution. If you love your smart TV’s software, you’re making a sacrifice. However, if you only use your smart TV as a “dumb” display for other devices, it’s a great solution. If you do really like your smart TV’s software, be sure to look up a guide for turning off as many privacy-invasive features as you can.

But remember: Other devices often have their own tracking features. Even if you have a streaming platform that doesn’t track your watching habits (like an Apple TV), apps that you run on that platform (like Netflix, for example) will keep track of your watching habits in those individual apps. Still, even if your streaming box is monitoring your watching habits, at least your smart TV won’t be. That’s a win if you want to keep marketers from knowing everything about your life.