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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 12th, 2023

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  • I can’t work out if this is well intentioned ignorance or trolling, so I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt and a serious answer.

    The first point is there are a huge number of threats to privacy and your online and data security from connecting to the internet even in western countries.

    VPNs are not just for protection from govt abuse, in fact their efficacy there is far lower than for several other use cases.

    If you’re in the US (for example) and with one of the biggest ISPs then every DNS request being made is (was anyway, I assume still is) logged and your internet usage is then sold off to data brokers to profile you.

    So yeah, dont trust your ISP, and if you’re dealing with a VPN that wants all that info then find a better one (proton or mullvad for exampke, you can pay with monero or bitcoin or even cash by snail mail)











  • Simless phones can make emergency calls because the towers are configured to accept a request for an emergency call to any device that handshakes sufficiently (in Europe and most of Asia anyway, I assume also true of USA because it does work).

    The phone is able to contact the nearest tower and initiate a call because it scans for the nearest towers in the boot process in order to go to the next step (check sim details and connect to configured provider). In the process of determining available towers it provides the IMEI to each of them.

    If you live in a country where you have to provide ID to buy a handset then this definitely isn’t anonymous, but even if you are in a country that doesnt, all the manufacturers track where every IMEI is shipped, and sku numbers on POS will easily allow determination of exactly when the device was sold. Even if you paid cash there will be CCTV footage of the purchase.

    TL;DR this will work mostly until you make a mistake against corporate tracking but will absolutely not protect you from three-letter-acronyms and law enforcement.

    Consider your threat model carefully before relying on it