The new anonymous phone operator lets you register using just your zip code

As for Wilcox, he has long been one of that small group of privacy enthusiasts who buy his SIM cards for cash in a fake name. But he hopes Freeley will offer an easier path, not just for people like him, but for everyday people as well.

“I don’t know of anyone who has ever presented this credibly,” Wilcox says. “Not your typical data mining phone, not your typical black hood hacker phone, but a regular privacy phone.”

However, enough tech companies have touted privacy as a feature of their commercial products that jaded consumers may not buy into a for-profit telecom company like Phreeli that claims to offer anonymity. But the EFF’s Cohen says Merrill’s record shows he’s not just using anti-surveillance as a marketing gimmick to sell something. “After watching Nick for so long, it all became a means to an end for him,” she says. “The end result is privacy for everyone.”

Meryl might not Such as the implications of describing Phreeli as a cellular carrier where every phone is a feature phone. But there is no doubt about it some Many of the company’s clients will use its privacy protections for crimes, just as they do with every surveillance-resistant tool, from Signal to Tor to wallets.

At the very least, Phreeli won’t provide a platform for spammers and robocallers, Merrill says. Even without knowing users’ identities, he says the company will prevent this kind of bad behavior by limiting the number of calls and text messages users are allowed, and blocking users who appear to be gaming the system. “If people think this is going to be a safe haven to abuse the phone network, it’s not going to work,” Merrill says.

But some of his telephone company’s customers, to Merrill’s regret, will do bad things, just as they sometimes used to do with payphones, that anonymous, cash-based telephone service that once existed on every building in American cities. “You put a quarter in, you didn’t need to introduce yourself, you could call whoever you wanted,” he recalls. “And 99.9% of the time, people weren’t doing bad things.” That small minority, he argues, did not justify society’s involuntary slide into the cellular panopticon in which we all live today, where a phone call no Linkage to freely circulating data about caller identity is a rare phenomenon.