The New Oil

Last week, I wrote about how our phone numbers have evolved into a unique, static ID that companies abuse to track us. As anecdotal evidence, I mentioned that “I personally had my last phone number for well over a decade before I finally got rid of cell service altogether in favor of the 'living on Wi-Fi 24/7' model.” This prompted an email from a reader asking me to elaborate. Why not?

I'm Not a Trailblazer

For those who are new to this concept, the idea is exactly how it sounds: I don't have a SIM card. Not physical or eSIM. My phone relies 100% on Wi-Fi.

In said email, the reader referenced The Hated One (they didn't cite the video in question, but I'm assuming it's the one titled “Why I don't use a SIM card and neither should you”), but this is not a unique idea to either him or myself. Naomi Brockwell has also covered a similar strategy, but I personally first heard about it from Michael Bazzell, though it seems like Mr Bazzell no longer recommends this strategy (more on that later). I bring this up just to make it clear that I'm not some sort of visionary pioneering new privacy techniques. Just building on the shoulders of giants.

The Breakdown

You might be asking how this works or how it's even feasible, and in truth, it's not for everyone (see the last section of this blog post for more).

The first major consideration is reachability. Truthfully, most of us don't need to be reachable 24/7. Believe it or not, many humans lived long and happy lives before the proliferation of cell phones and they survived just fine. So will your kids, your boss, or whoever else might need to reach you during your period of disconnection. This is especially true when you consider how short our periods of disconnection often are. If you're the type of person who works from a consistent, static location (such as an office), you may only be disconnected for a few hours a day (while you're commuting). Even less if you work from home.

If you're like me, you also probably frequently visit a lot of the same places, which means even when you're not at home or work, you're still probably pretty connected. For example, my wife and I shop at the same grocery store for most of our needs so I have their Wi-Fi saved on my phone. Yes, believe it or not, all that advice about “don't connect to public Wi-Fi” is largely outdated, though for the record I do still use a VPN on my phone as a general privacy tool anyways. I also have my singer's Wi-Fi for band practice. Other than that I'm kind of a homebody, but you may want to add things like your friends or other venues and shops you frequent. Most places have guest Wi-Fi nowadways, so you really only need to be disconnected during transit.

That's probably the next consideration: how do you handle the transit? For navigation, nearly all maps services now offer offline maps, even Google and Apple. Privacy-respecting options like Magic Earth and Organic Maps have had this ability for years. All it takes is a bit of thinking ahead to download them before you need them. For entertainment, I have podcasts, audiobooks, and music. All of these offer downloads. For podcasts, I use AntennaPod (which downloads by default), and for audiobooks I use Libby to borrow them from my local library (which, again, downloads my books by default). Even Apple Music and Spotify have options to download music, and if your device doesn't have enough space (like mine), just pick a few albums, artists, or playlists you've been jamming lately and download those. Between my entertainment and my maps, I'm pretty much set. Anything on top of that is a bonus. Even most data-required functions can be handled as normal. For example, let's say I'm headed to the store and forgot to ask my wife if she needed more eggs. I can send her a Signal message like normal, and once I get to the store and connect to their Wi-Fi, it'll transmit like normal.

The big question for most readers will be about phone numbers, and this is probably where living without a SIM card becomes infeasible for most people outside the US: I use Voice-over-IP and private messaging 100% of the time. I have nearly all of my friends, family, and privacy-related associates on Signal (or Session, or SimpleX, or something like that). For everyone else like my bank or coworkers, I give them a dedicated MySudo number. Again though, I've been lamenting for years that VoIP options are very limited outside the US, so this may not be doable for non-Americans (I'll talk more about that at the end).

The final consideration I can think of is if you actually need a SIM number. Even if you live in the US – where VoIP numbers abound – there are some services that demand a SIM number. Cloaked, for example, as well as numerous Discord communities. There's plenty others out there, I'm just forgetting them right now. Dating apps, for example, for the single readers in the audience. There are services out there who offer temporary numbers, but in my experience they're hit or miss (and that's to say nothing of the concerns that come with having an active account registered to a number you don't control). There are ways around it, but in my opinion there's a lot of drawbacks and concerns. I don't recommend using temporary numbers, at least for any accounts you actually care about.

What I Do & Why

Why go through all this trouble? It's well known that phones are a privacy nightmare. Most people buy their phones on a payment plan, which means they're tied directly to your real name since you need to take out a line of credit for it. Even if you buy your phone in cash and provide a fake name (such as with Mint Mobile), you're still handing over location data to your cell provider, and it doesn't take much of that for data brokers to make accurate guesses about who you are or your situation. If you're new to all this tracking, I'd encourage you to pause for a moment and watch The Hated One's video I linked above. He does a pretty good job of explaining a lot of the risks with true stories to illustrate.

I wish I could say this is why I got rid of my phone plan – that I'm just so committed to my privacy – but I'm afraid the real reason is much more mundane and practical: a year or two ago, money was really tight and I was struggling to squeeze out every penny I could. Around that same time, my employer stopped offering reimbursement for phone plans. So I dropped my phone plan. I needed every penny, and since I wasn't using my SIM number for anything other than data, I dropped it.

That said, I have a cheat code for being SIM-free that still allows me to live as if I had a SIM card: the Calyx Hotspot. For those who don't know, this is a wireless hotspot offered by the Calyx Institute (makers of Calyx OS). It costs a little more than a normal hotspot, but it's reasonably speedy (in most cases) with unlimited data, the profit goes to supporting the Calyx Institute, and they buy the device on your behalf so your real name never gets attached to it.

For me personally, this provides a huge degree of flexibility for a relatively low price. It allows me to be connected 24/7 when I'm commuting, traveling, or otherwise somewhere where I can't use the Wi-Fi for whatever reason. It's way better quality than a phone hotspot for when I need to use my computer while traveling (and I have definitely stayed at hotels where my computer can't get onto the Wi-Fi for various reasons or the Wi-Fi is too slow). It also comes in handy at home since our ISP is downright awful – we've had more outages at this property in the couple years we've been here than I have in my entire life combined (and I've had internet basically nonstop since 2003). I use it constantly in my personal life as well as at work, where it has come in handy on job sites with coworkers. And as for “low price,” for me the hotspot is $500/year, which is just under $42/month. That's more than a Mobile Virtual Network Operation (MVNO) plan – such as Mint Mobile – but also less than a typical contract phone plan with increased flexibility compared to both.

I will admit, here's why I say it's cheating: I can write off the hotspot as a company expense. It's both a charity expense supporting the Calyx Institute, and pretty much every moment I'm not at the day job (and sometimes during the day), I'm doing TNO work, so it applies. (Also 90% of the time, I only use it for commute then hop on the Wi-Fi wherever I end up working for the day.) This allows me to eliminate a personal phone plan cost out of my personal finances completely and subsidize a workaround through TNO. Not everyone has that option though, so for some people replacing your phone plan with a hotspot doesn't make financial sense, especially if you don't need the added flexibility of having internet for your laptop almost anywhere.

Now, astute readers will note that cell providers aren't the only people tracking us, and they're right. That's why I also keep my phone as digitally minimal as possible. I've said many times that I don't keep email on my phone. I also don't keep Reddit or Discord or Mastodon or hardly anything compared to most people. Aside from the stock apps – like browser and camera – on my home page I have my aforementioned entertainment apps (Libby, Apple Music, and AntennaPod), plus Duolingo, Signal, and my calorie tracker. I have Magic Earth, Tuta Calendar, a few other lesser-used messengers, Nextcloud, my VPN, and a handful of niche apps (like Loops since I can't upload via web). Compared to most people, my phone is very minimal, and I've also made use of things like Shelter to help isolate more concerning apps. I also make generous use of the settings to disable internet connectivity on apps that don't need internet and to make sure I'm disabling location data or setting it to “when in use” as needed. I try to keep a close eye on the few apps I do choose to use. But this is standard advice across the privacy community: we should all be keeping our apps to a minimum with tight permissions.

Should You?

There are those in the privacy community who would argue that this is the only way to safely use a cell phone: no SIM card, ever. Many of them would even be offended that I have any proprietary apps – or any apps – at all, or that I use public Wi-Fi, or even the Calyx hotspot. However, veteran readers know that I'm not a “one-true-way” kind of person. This setup certainly does give me a lot more privacy than the average person, especially being coupled with a custom operating system. But it's not perfect. I have some apps split-tunneled outside my VPN for functionality reasons. And there's good arguments to be made that my hotspot is still trackable. Plus some of the apps I keep aren't great for privacy (like Duolingo, for example). Try as I might, there's only so much “harm reduction” I can do, and I could certainly get more protection by doing more. But as I've written about before, privacy is a spectrum, not a binary state of being.

At the start of this post, I outlined some questions to ask yourself. Maybe right now your kids are young or have health complications and you do need to be available. Maybe someday they'll be more independent and they can handle it if you're unreachable for a couple hours during your commute. Maybe you work from home and you're hardly ever off the grid. Maybe you're in a foreign country and you just can't get around the need for a phone number. I can't in good conscience say that everyone across the board should do what I did. I did it as a leap of faith, unsure if it would even be feasible. In my case, I got lucky. It works great for me, and I don't see myself going back any time soon. For others, it may just be a dream.

Earlier I mentioned that Michael Bazzell no longer recommends this strategy. Instead, he recommends simply being mindful of your signals. As he recommends the use of Graphene OS, he points out tools like the ability to disable and enable your SIM card at will and the ability to have chips (like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth) go dormant after a period of inactivity. Personally I find this sort of manual involvement to be a bit cumbersome – having to intentionally remember to enable or disable things – but this would certainly be better than simply leaving your SIM card on 24/7 for those who have the organizational skills to stay on top of it. My point in sharing this is to remind readers that many roads lead to Rome (or at least the suburbs and outskirts, which – for the purposes of this analogy – is close enough). You don't have to go all-in like myself or Ms Brockwell. There's lots of ways to improve your privacy. (You can read his specific advice in his latest book, which I linked above.)

Regardless, for those who've never heard of this strategy before, I hope this has given you some things to think about and get outside the box. Even if you can't do something like this, maybe there are other areas of your life where you can tighten up your privacy or security that you didn't consider before. I'm pretty open about not putting email on my phone – mostly for digital minimalist and mental health reasons – so maybe you could consider using less apps. Or switching to cash. There's a million small things we can all do that add up.

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