As marketers, data brokers, and tech giants continually expand their access to individuals' data and movements across the web, tools like VPNs or cookie blocker can feel increasingly feeble and futile. There are few options for the average person to resist online stalkers. Even after coming up with a technical solution last year for how phone carriers could stop automatically collecting users' locations, it would be difficult to convince them to implement the change. They chose to be the carrier they wanted to see.
The result is a new company, dubbed Invisv, that offers mobile data designed to separate users from specific identifiers so the company can't access or track customers' data. The Pretty Good Phone Privacy service will replace the method carriers normally use to turn cell phone tower connection data into a trove of information about users' movements. The Relay service will disassociate a user from their internet address.
A general-purpose hammer that can solve a lot of privacy problems is if you can decouple a user's identity from how they connect to a network. Currently, privacy is not the default, so we are working on that. People are becoming more concerned about what their phone is leaking to as a result of this.
The ability to mask your phone's identity from cell towers comes from a revelation about why cell towers collect unique IMSI numbers, which can be tracked by both telecoms and other entities. The only reason carriers need to track IMSI numbers before allowing devices to connect to cell towers is so they can run billing checks and confirm that a given sim card and device are paid up with their carrier. Invisv can implement their PGPP technology by acting as a carrier.
Users get unlimited mobile data in the US and most European Union countries on the PGPP "Mobile Pro" plan. Users are given 30 random IMSI number changes per month, and the changes can be made on demand or automatically. The system is designed to prevent INVISV and the cell towers from knowing which IMSI is yours. There is a plan that offers eight IMSI number changes per month and 9 gigabytes of high-speed data per month.
The Relay service is included in both of the plans. PGPP's Relay is a method for blocking everyone, from your internet provider or carrier to the websites you visit, from knowing both who you are and what you're looking at online at the same time. Relays allow you to browse the web like a normal person while shielding your information from the world. The information about the page you are attempting to load is not visible to the first relay. After the second relay connects an alternate address to your request, it can decode and view the website you are attempting to load. This second relay is being provided by Fastly and Invisv. Fastly is a third-party provider for private relay.
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