The End of Ghosts

It used to be easy to disappear. Move to a new city. Dye your hair. Avoid credit cards. Only use pay phones. Turns out, anonymity was one of the overlooked luxuries of modern life. Anyone could become a ghost.

That was before cell phones, of course. Now, we all carry one, and we do our best to protect our privacy. Many popular messaging apps encrypt texts by default. Plenty of us add a VPN and lock down app permissions.

But even these precautions can’t hide where we are. Wherever we go, our phones stay connected to a cell tower, which gives our carrier our location in real time.

So where does that leave anyone who wants to stay out of sight?

To answer that, let’s start with the information your carrier collects. Our location, yes, but carriers also log which numbers we call and text.

Those logs reveal a lot. Where you sleep. Where you work. Where you brunch Sunday mornings. Which numbers you call and text and the metadata that comes with them, such as the time, the length of the call, and where you were.

And carriers don’t necessarily keep all this information to themselves. Logs can be held for long stretches, sold or shared, or exposed in a breach. Carriers who sell this data have long said they strip the names. But a 2013 study of 1.5 million phone records found that’s not enough. Research showed that if you knew where someone had been just four times over a 15-month period, you could find them in the data 95 percent of the time and see everywhere else they’d been over that period.

The clearest documented example of carriers sharing location data came in April 2024, when the FCC fined major carriers across the US nearly $200 million combined, finding that they had shared customers’ location data with third parties without consent and hadn’t adequately safeguarded it.

But is this just the cost of having a cell phone? Many Americans seem to think so: In a recent Harris Poll, 71 percent agreed with the statement that consumers must accept risks to their privacy when using a mobile device. Yet 80 percent also believed they could protect their privacy by managing their device settings, and 59 percent didn’t know that turning off location services doesn’t stop all tracking.

That leaves us with what seems a binary choice: Accept that nothing is really private and that the cost of modernity is to live in some sort of surveillance state. Or do the unthinkable and give up the phone.

Unless there’s a third option. One carrier is built on the bet that there is.

Cape, a privacy-first mobile carrier, has found a different way. Instead of trying to figure out how to protect data after it’s collected, Cape collects less of it in the first place.

“We started off providing service to people for whom privacy is a matter of safety, whether for themselves or others—people like journalists and domestic violence survivors,” says Ruddy Wang, Cape’s head of consumer growth. Cape now offers the same approach to everyone.

It begins at enrollment. Cape doesn’t ask new subscribers for their name, their Social Security number, or their address. And the logs of your calls and texts? Cape deletes them after one day.

Cape also changes the ID number a network uses to recognize your phone, a capability not available with other carriers. Every 24 hours, that number is replaced, so the same phone looks like a different subscriber each day. This makes it harder for anyone with access to network data to follow it over time, from advertisers to hackers to the carriers themselves.

In addition to added security measures, Cape is a nationwide carrier allowing a single line to reach two major US networks, with a preferred network chosen in the app and an automatic fallback when coverage drops. Each plan also includes two additional numbers for shopping, sign-ups, and verification texts. So, when a cashier or website asks for your phone number, you can keep your main number private and out of marketing databases.

To be clear, Cape isn’t a cure-all. While it collects far less data than other carriers, it can’t control what the apps on your phone collect. A map or weather app can still record where you are, for example. Your phone works the way it always has. Your carrier just ends up with far less of your information.

So, is it still possible to disappear? For anyone who carries a phone, probably not. At least not completely. But most people aren’t looking to go entirely off the grid.

“Most people I talk to are regular people who just want to opt out of the surveillance economy,” Wang says.

That may not mean giving up the technology. It may mean asking how much information your carrier needs to collect in the first place. Ghosts may be a thing of the past, but how much of yourself you leave behind is still up to you.

Learn more about Cape here.